Working on a legacy project can be a chore. Fighting the same old problems over and over again, adding new features takes ages, seems like every time we fix one bug, we uncover three others. Sounds like wishful thinking, but I know it can be better.

Earlier this week I got an idea of trying to communicate with Pidgin, a chat client, via the terminal. Sounded like a fun thing to hack on, plus, could be made useful (in my head, at least), for things like logging from a web application directly to IM, or, heck, even creating something like Github’s Hubot, commanding a server or an application just via chat. Surely I wasn’t the first one to come up with this idea and after a bit of a googling found out that Pidgin’s libpurple has a nice API for that, exposed via D-Bus.