How I built a Discord 'ship-tracker' bot in a weekend (and the 3-process architecture that keeps it alive 24/7)

Short summary

A senior backend engineer automated their 30-minute weekly Discord curator task by building ShipTrack, a bot that tracks product launches and posts weekly digests. Initial attempt: single Node.js process deployed to Render's free tier, which auto-slept the bot and caused duplicate message reactions and timeouts. Solution: split into three processes—web service (slash command webhook), always-on worker (Discord gateway WebSocket), and scheduled script (weekly job)—solving reliability while teaching how different Discord communication channels need different infrastructure.

• •Built a Discord bot to automate weekly product launch digests for a 220-member indie founder community
• •Discovered that single-process bots fail on auto-sleeping platforms due to fundamental differences between WebSocket and HTTP communication patterns
• •Implemented a 3-process architecture (web service + always-on worker + scheduled job) that's platform-agnostic and teaches foundational DevOps thinking

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