Meet Zulu!

Today I want to share one of the latest things I've been working on at Zibuu.

His name is Zulu.

And yes, apparently this time I managed to name a project without using a demon or a chemical element.

Progress.

Why "Zulu"?

The name comes from the phonetic alphabet used in aviation.

Zulu represents the letter Z, the last letter of the alphabet and, conveniently, the same letter that starts Zibuu.

It felt appropriate.

Normally, I tend to name my projects after demons from the Ars Goetia or elements from the periodic table.

Yes, I know.

It's a little cliché.

But in my defense, both give me a surprisingly large collection of names to choose from, and naming projects is already hard enough without having to invent new words every time.

This time, though, Zulu just felt right.

And what started as another software project is slowly becoming something much bigger.

So, what is Zulu?

Zulu is becoming a bot designed to work across both Discord and Telegram communities.

At the moment, most of the development is focused around three main areas:

• Automation

• Moderation

• Community interaction

The idea is to make repetitive staff tasks easier while also giving communities more ways to interact with each other.

Bots are usually treated as little command machines.

You type something.

The bot responds.

Done.

But I'm interested in seeing how far I can push that idea.

I'd like Zulu to feel less like a collection of commands and more like an actual component of the community.

Something capable of helping staff manage things behind the scenes while also being present for members in a way that feels useful instead of annoying.

And I've also not completely abandoned a slightly more ambitious idea:

turning Zulu into some kind of personal assistant.

I don't know exactly what that would look like yet.

But that's part of what makes the project interesting.

PHP doing things people apparently don't want PHP to do

Zulu has also become a very interesting experiment for me personally.

I'm discovering new ways of using PHP for things I wouldn't necessarily have considered years ago.

And yes.

PHP.

That language the internet has been declaring dead approximately every six months for the last twenty years.

I know PHP has been criticized endlessly.

Some criticism is deserved.

Some of it feels like people repeating jokes from 2012.

But I have a lot of affection and respect for the language.

PHP was the language I learned web development with, and even today it remains the language where I feel the most comfortable.

It's basically my programming safe place.

Give me PHP, Laravel, a database and enough coffee, and I'll probably figure something out.

Zulu has forced me to approach PHP differently, though.

A traditional web application mostly waits for someone to visit a page or make a request.

A bot behaves differently.

It needs to listen.

React.

Process events.

Interact with APIs.

Maintain state.

Handle multiple communities.

Perform scheduled tasks.

Deal with messages arriving constantly.

And preferably avoid exploding when someone discovers a weird edge case at three in the morning.

Working on Zulu has made me explore that side of PHP much more deeply, and I've genuinely enjoyed it.

Built for the communities I'm already part of

For now, I don't have plans to release Zulu publicly.

At least not yet.

Zulu is mainly being developed for communities where I'm already involved as staff, because that's where I can actually identify the problems I want it to solve.

Instead of thinking:

"What features would people theoretically want from a Discord bot?"

I can think:

"This task is annoying. Can Zulu do it for us?"

That's a much more interesting way to build software.

If staff members repeatedly perform the same action manually, that's a potential automation.

If moderation involves five unnecessary steps, maybe Zulu can reduce them to one.

If members aren't interacting much, perhaps Zulu can introduce systems that encourage participation.

That's where the project becomes genuinely useful.

It isn't being developed from a checklist of features.

It's being developed around real situations.

Will Zulu ever be public?

Maybe.

I've definitely thought about it.

The problem isn't necessarily publishing the source code.

That's the easy part.

The difficult part is everything that comes after that.

Running a bot like Zulu requires an entire environment around it.

Servers.

Databases.

Credentials.

Discord applications.

Telegram bots.

Permissions.

Background workers.

Queues.

Configuration.

Updates.

And probably several things I'm forgetting while writing this.

As developers, sometimes we look at documentation saying:

1. Clone repository
2. Run composer install
3. Configure .env
4. Done!

And think:

"Yeah, that's easy."

Then someone who has never touched Linux before tries it and suddenly you've accidentally become technical support for Docker, DNS, databases, firewall rules and SSH.

So the more complex Zulu becomes, the more hesitant I am about maintaining a public version.

Because releasing software is one thing.

Supporting software is another project entirely.

That doesn't mean Zulu will never become publicly available.

Just that if I eventually do it, I want to do it properly.

The admin panel: because I'm not configuring everything through commands

Like many modern Discord and Telegram bots, Zulu has its own administration panel.

And this has probably been one of the most demanding parts of the entire project.

Bots can become surprisingly complicated once you start allowing each community to configure its own behavior.

Different permissions.

Different channels.

Different moderation rules.

Different features.

Different integrations.

Different messages.

Different everything.

Trying to manage all of that exclusively through chat commands would quickly become painful.

So a web interface was basically necessary.

The panel allows Zulu to behave more like a platform than a simple bot.

And, naturally, building that panel and connecting everything together has also been one of the largest parts of the work.

Sometimes the feature itself takes twenty minutes.

Making the feature configurable, permission-aware, understandable and difficult to accidentally destroy from the admin panel takes considerably longer.

Software development is fun like that.

Somewhere along the way, Zulu became a character

Something else happened while I was developing the project.

Zulu stopped being just the name of the bot.

He became a character.

And eventually, Zulu became the official mascot of Zibuu.

That actually means quite a lot for what I want Zibuu to represent.

Zibuu exists in some of the slightly stranger corners of the internet.

And I mean that affectionately.

We're developers.

We're furries.

We're therians.

We're femboys.

We're LGBTQ+ people.

We're gamers.

We're artists.

We're server nerds.

We're people who have spent unreasonable amounts of time customizing a Discord profile.

Sometimes we're several of those things simultaneously.

Zulu was designed to represent that mix.

He's intentionally cute, geeky, a little chaotic and unmistakably part of the communities Zibuu is being built around.

I didn't want Zibuu to have a generic corporate mascot created because some marketing guide said brands need a recognizable character.

I wanted something that actually feels like it belongs here.

Zulu does.

What's next?

Honestly?

I'm still finding out.

There's a lot I want to build.

More moderation tools.

More automation.

More integrations.

More ways for community members to interact.

Better tools for staff.

And potentially some much more experimental features later on.

The personal assistant idea is still sitting somewhere in the back of my head too.

Whether that turns into something serious or another feature that sends me into a three-week programming rabbit hole remains to be seen.

Probably both.

But that's also one of my favorite parts of building projects like this.

I don't always know exactly where they're going.

Sometimes I start because I want to solve one small problem.

Then I learn something new.

That creates another idea.

Then another.

And eventually I'm staring at something significantly larger than what I originally planned.

Zulu is definitely becoming one of those projects.

What started as a bot for helping me manage communities is slowly turning into an automation platform, an experiment with PHP, a possible assistant...

...and somehow a furry mascot.

Honestly, that feels very Zibuu.