fiadocsbot sends notifications whenever a new document is uploaded to the website of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA). The main account on X currently has around 100k followers.

If you need help setting up notifications, check out this page.

Context #

As described in their own words, “The FIA is the governing body of motor sport”. They are the regulating authority for Formula 1, which means that they are the ones that issue punishments when teams or drivers break the rules during races.

I started following Formula 1 in 2020 and noticed that the FIA uploaded (sometimes quite important) documents on their website. These documents went from fines because someone drove too fast in the pitlane to decisions that affected the outcome of the World Championship.

These documents were often published after the official broadcast had already ended, leaving fans to refresh the FIA’s website when they were waiting for a certain decision. I launched fiadocsbot in 2021, which automatically tweeted whenever a new document was published.

Available Platforms #

• X
• Discord
• Telegram
• Mastodon

Tech stack #

I initially wrote the bot in Go as a way to learn the language. It ran on a Raspberry Pi at home, which was sufficient at the time.

Later, I extended the bot to convert the PDF documents to images so it could post those as well. Because I was running into some performance issues on the Raspberry Pi at the time, I rewrote it in Rust.

These performance issues were probably due to unrelated issues, but I also wanted to write something in Rust so this was a good excuse.

After the bot started gaining some traction, and I had some unforseen power outages at home, I started renting an OVHCloud VPS where the bot is currently running.

I rewrote the bot in TypeScript in preparation for a significant planned future upgrade. It’s currently running on K3s. I use Prometheus, Grafana, and Sentry for monitoring purposes.