KFKA – The multi-talented Discord bot

I started developing KFKA as a hobby project to control certain aspects of my Raspberry Pi. Ever since, it has grown into a multi-talented bot handling whatever use cases I throw at it. In this post I cover a few of them.

Raspberry Pi – Remote Control

A  few months back, I got my hands on a few Raspberry Pis (you can read all about my adventures with Raspberry Pi here) and I was soon tired of SSHing (I totally made up this word) into them every time I needed to do something (start / stop a service, reboot, shutdown etc.). That’s when KFKA was born. I already knew the power of Discord bots from when I created AKSH. (AKSH is a Discord bot that automates the self-hosted lab deployment on AWS for my course Red Team Adversary Emulation).

I started out by implementing commands to reboot and shutdown the Raspberry Pi. That soon escalated into KFKA becoming a task manager (start / stop services) for the Pi. The story doesn’t end here, I implemented a few more functionalities to minimize my SSH logins but I won’t cover them here (well, for obvious reasons).

Nuke for Bandwidth Hoggers

One of the biggest challenges while working from home is running low on the bandwidth of your internet connection. Specially, during the critical moments (video call with your boss, during a presentation, launching those heavy corporate web applications etc.). In those moments, don’t you wish if you could just nuke every other device out of the network in an instant? Abracadabra, enter KFKA. I won’t go into specifics but KFKA can nuke devices out of my network at my command and let them in, at my command. (I am watching Spider-man: No Way Home as I write this, so the good old adage “With great power comes great responsibility” is not lost on me).

Expense Tracker

I have been using KFKA for tracking my expenses since last few months and I can already see the benefits of using a bot over an expense tracking app. One of the biggest advantage is it’s simplicity. Everything is done via text (yes, the old way) but it gives a lot more flexibility. Do check out my blog post How to track expenses like a nerd to know how I use KFKA to track my expenses.