What gave you the idea to start FredBoat?

I think my main inspiration back in 2016 must have been BooBot. An old multipurpose bot that had a music variant. As for my motivation, boredom is one heck of a driver.

What is a FredBoat?

FredBoat is a play on the name Fred and the word bot. While initially the brainchild of a high-schooler, FredBoat has gone a long way to deliver music to more than 3 million+ Discord servers

Why join the team?

I’m a software engineer at heart. There are many non-technical aspects of running a Discord bot such as taxes, paperwork, online presence, and other concerns. With the backing of BotLabs, I can spend more time on actually improving FredBoat. Although I was already turning a profit, I can now worry less about fluctuations in my income.

What’s your favorite coding language?

I have always been fascinated by the problem-solving aspect of software engineering. Developing a small and simple Discord bot is something that even experienced beginners can do it. The most interesting challenges arise when you have to worry about scaling up to handling thousands of events per second, while also being able to concurrently stream music to thousands of Discord servers, all of which requires low latency.

We tackle some of these problems with a series of microservices and working with reactive programming using modern technologies like Spring Boot framework and the Kotlin programming language. Spring and Kotlin complement each other and dramatically reduces verbosity and tight coupling.

Favorite food?

While I could never settle for one kind of food, I’m an avid collector of whiskey and tea.