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Top-level
@molly0xfff What really saddens me is that this is more than just entertainment: for many people, this is the gateway to the world of software development. It starts with a simple silly bot, and could grow into an entire career or a landmark project. My first dabble in 'modern' programming was making such a silly bot. I wouldn't be where I am today or know what I know today if it wasn't for that first spark. 12 comments
@opalium @molly0xfff The good thing is, you can build bots for Mastodon, and it is not that complicated. My friend @philippsteinkrueger is building some already @opalium @molly0xfff Every bus, weather, traffic, wordpress-to-tweet, and emergency alert bot that is maintained by an individual or nonprofit is now at risk... thats a lot of free content about to be lost.  @nathanharig @molly0xfff @opalium …that’s a lot of free content about to be “moved to the Fediverse” This, 100% For me, writing a silly bot was my gateway into Python, learning how to use an API, writing structured code. All of the above are transferable skills; it's not just a silly bot any more than 'Hello World' is. @opalium @molly0xfff there quite a number bots shadowing #Twitter to post to #Mastodon - those are affected, too, I assume? I cannot agree more. I started my programming journey with a hobby game built on the Twitter API. Learned so much, and had such fun that I made programming my career, despite having no formal education. I even landed my first job with a Twitter API example. Predictably awful moves from a predictably awful human. @molly0xfff @opalium Random outsider who agrees. My gateway drug into software development was writing a silly IRC bot in the mIRC scripting language of all things. That spark when I got it working got me hooked. From that I moved onto TCL (which I'm still fond of,) then Python and finally C# @Mohaneds @molly0xfff @opalium Same here! My first self-taught programming experience was customizing and eventually writing mIRC script bots. Before that I'd taken a BASIC class, so tinkering in a world of live inputs and dynamic responses was very new and engaging. @Mohaneds @molly0xfff @opalium That I could do that for free and people had friendly guides and examples was so encouraging. If I had to pay to run those bots, I never would have tried to begin with. |
Gregory's Server
@opalium @molly0xfff When I was learning "data science", one of my first projects was building a sentiment analysis tool for tweets mentioning Spanish political parties. The project was crap, but I learned a lot.