Side project · Community bot for [THE FACILITY] · 2021–present
A.R.I.A. is a Python Discord bot I built and have maintained for nearly five years for Kyle Hill's community server, [THE FACILITY]. Hybrid slash + prefix commands, MongoDB-backed profiles & XP, NASA APOD and Wolfram Alpha integrations, an interactive muffin generator with buttons and dropdowns, a containment minigame, daily space images — and a Heroku CD pipeline behind it all.
![A.R.I.A. — glitched, neon-tinted portrait used as the bot's avatar in [THE FACILITY]](/assets/img/aria.jpg)
A community bot built for a science-communication audience. It earns its place by being useful, on-theme, and fun to interact with.
Buttons · Dropdowns · Ephemeral UI
The community's signature gag: an ephemeral, customizable muffin generator built on Discord's modern UI components. Users pick flavor, topping, and presentation through buttons and selects; the bot composes and delivers the result without spamming the channel.
NASA APOD · Wolfram Alpha
On-demand astronomy and computation. /spacepost
triggers the daily space image with a fallback chain across
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day and an ESA RSS pool —
persisted to MongoDB so the same image never runs twice.
Wolfram Alpha integration handles ad-hoc science queries.
Persistent state · Community lore
An interactive minigame riffing on the show's running bits. Game state persists across bot restarts so a community-wide session can stretch across days without losing progress.
MongoDB-backed
User profiles, leveling, and badges to recognize active members. ETL helpers exist for migrating XP and badges between environments — because a community of this size actually needs that.
For mods, by request
Community management features built to support the moderator team — user lookups, role workflows, and the unsexy operational glue that keeps a server of this scale livable.
Slash · Prefix · One implementation
Every public command works as both a slash command
(/muffin) and a legacy prefix command
(!ARIA --muffin) through discord.py's hybrid
command framework — backwards-compatible with the muscle
memory of the original community while embracing the
modern interaction model.
A real production system, not a hobby script. Tested, deployed, observed, and on its second major library migration.
A.R.I.A. is Python 3.10+ on top of discord.py 2.3.2, with cogs split by domain (muffin, science, kevin, moderation, admin, fun, utility) and a clean separation between command handlers, services, and persistence. State lives in MongoDB (via Motor), image work runs through Pillow, and the test suite is pytest with async support — including coverage of the Discord interaction patterns themselves, which is harder than it sounds.
The deployment story matches the engineering story: three
long-lived branches (main production,
develop staging, agentic active
development), automatic staging deploys, manual production
promotion, and a Heroku Procfile setup that's survived
multiple platform upgrades.
"Every public command works the modern way and the way the community already typed it. Backwards compatibility for muscle memory."
The codebase is also where I exercise practices I believe in: SOLID-leaning structure, real test coverage for behavior I actually care about, CI enforced linting and formatting (Black, isort, flake8), and the discipline of cleanup commits that don't add features but make the next change easier.
A short, important note about the people this bot exists for.
Kyle Hill is a science communicator whose YouTube channel covers everything from nuclear history (his Half-Life Histories series) to the physics behind pop culture. [THE FACILITY] is the Discord community that grew up around that work — the audience this bot is built to serve.
I'm an engineer who happens to be a fan; A.R.I.A. is mine, but the show is Kyle's. If this page is the first you've heard of him, the right next click is his channel — and if you want to support what he makes, his Patreon is where to do it.
The day job, the writing, the talks, and the rest of the work live on the main page.