Wish our colleagues a happy birthday

We build an intranet app using Django to help HR manage people at work. And since we use Metabase for all our analysis tasks, we got the HR database to query all the things about our colleagues (not the salary though, it’s accounting’s matter).

I’m not interested in my colleagues' days of leave, but I wish they got a happy birthday, so why don’t we send out a wish, automatically?

I write a question in SQL, it’s just as simple as list out all people who have date and month equal to today’s date and month. And use a bot to check the question everyday at 10am, then send out a wish if the question is not empty.

The tricky part is we don’t know firsthand what should be included in the message, like our colleagues' name, slack id, etc. So I have to evaluate them at running time. The solution is to pass a string to alert message and then convert it to string interpolation later. Like this:

// When creating alert
const originalMessage = "Happy birthday to ${rows.join(", ")}!";

// At running time
const rows = ["some", "data"];
const theMessage = eval('`' + originalMessage + '`');
sendMessageToSlack(theMessage);

I know it’s extremely risky to use eval() anywhere, so I use safe-eval instead. Although at the moment it has a security bug, it should be fine for our internal use, at least for now.