Bot

Bot

I attended a Javascript meetup ran by Thinkful and hosted by Justin Ezor. The goal was to introduce coders of all experience levels to Javascript by creating a Twitter bot. YES!  An internet bot, also known as web robot, WWW robot or simply –bot-, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet. I have heard about bots and was excited to learn how they work.

We were instructed to install Node.js on our laptops which I already have. Then we were directed to a Thinkful page to download Javascript code that had already been created for Twitter.  Most large companies have built APIs for their customers, or for internal use. These API’s allow us to communicate with Twitter’s database. Next we needed to login to Twitter’s application management page to get access codes. These codes are necessary to interact with Twitter’s server. Once we got these codes, we then inserted them into the Javascript code we downloaded earlier. Now for the fun part.

The code we downloaded allowed us to instruct the bot to search twitter’s servers for posts that contained keywords, I chose ‘motivation.’ The task of the bot was to search the last 100 posts for the word “motivaton” and then respond to those users directly. So, whoever has the word motivation in the last 100 posts would receive a reply from me saying “The time is Now. Let’s do it!”. Within seconds 51 replies had been sent from my twitter page. It was amazing and took no time at all.

I really enjoyed this meetup and met a few people. There was no time to exchange info afterwards as the class should ran overtime and most of us left when we needed to. There was an engineer, a self- taught coder, curious coders and other like me who were in other coding programs. I am happy to have left with a new code and a better understanding of bots.




Add Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *