SteemDev Part 3 - First SteemJS Project and Getting Started
Introduction
As I said before, I'm making my way, little by little, towards understanding and playing with the steem blockchain. I'm a beginner in development but I'm building my knowledge day after day. Here I share my journey towards becoming a SteeemDev, some of the hurdles and discoveries that I'm making along the way.
My First Project Will Be...
@photofeed is this really cool account that curate the best of the best in professional photographies on the steem blockchain. They resteem 5 times a day and I have to upvote all of them manually since there are no services that allows me to upvote someone else's resteem automatically.
This is a pain in the neck especially since our daughter is born. I get busy and forget about dealing with that detail of my life sometimes.
So that will be it, create a resteem bot for myself so that I can upvote @photofeed's resteem without having to do so manually. For that purpose, bots can be very useful...if the action you are taking with them are action you would do manually anyway, why not automate it?
If you want to follow the progress, you can keep an eye on https://github.com/RenaudGagne/resteem-bot
Connecting my computer to the Steem Blockchain
Now that has always been where I got confused...and I still am to some extent. But I made some headway today with my friend.
So here are the steps I took.
- I installed CMDER
- I installed Node.JS
- Create a local directory called /resteem-bot
Then in CMDER I typed:
npm init
It asked a whole bunch of stuff which I mostly just press enter through.
Now this create a package.json so that whoever in the future plays with the resteem-bot will get all the libraries they will need to run it.
Then I enter in CMDER:
npm install steem --save
then I opened node.js to write javascript in the console.
node
and then
var steem = require("steem")
so that I have a variable to call the steem blockchain.
then whever I type steem
I get the list of all of the different call I can do on the steem blockchain... THERE ARE A LOT OF THEM!
So I went over to https://github.com/steemit/steem-js/tree/master/doc to get the master documentation for all that is steemJS API calls.
I'm still lost when it comes to what to do next but at least, I'm right at the door and can poke around to learn more. There is another place I'll be looking into which is on the Steem Dev portal. The tutorial documentation on SteemJS is quite parse and some serious work is needed there to help people like me really get a grip on how to best use SteemJS. Here is the link to the current SteemJS tutorial. https://developers.steem.io/tutorials/#tutorials-javascript
Conclusion
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
― Bill Gates
Wow, it will be great to have a resteem-bot on the Steem blockchain. This is what I call thinking out of box and it will be useful for many people and many communities.
You are progressing well and doing great with your learning.
My regards to your new born baby and your lovely wife
Nice. Sounds like you are making progress. Glad you are spending energy on Steem projects.
How's your little girl ?
I hope she's doing okay.
Photofeed is indeed a great project. All these blistering photographs and amazing sceneries make us fall in love with nature.
I am a big fan of photography as most of my posts relate to photography. And photofeed has resteemed my photography on multiple occasions. Thank you.
Have a great day.
It had been a long time since I saw you here, that bot looks quite promising, but my question is what parameters or what photos do you know what to do and what do not?
Or is it totally random?
I know the guys behind the project so I trust in their jugement. If they resteem, its worth my upvote.
Thank you for sharing such a beautiful post. I always show respect to you for this post. You're working for steemit. I love it.
I am agree. @cryptoctopus
I think I will go so far.
thanks for the post
One of my goals in Steemit is to develop things, games or apps. But I feel lost because I don't have a lot of experience coding... I think I need a team, even if it's small. I'm sure that there is a lot of info and tools, but for me sometimes it's too much information and I don't understand a lot of it.
BTW thank you for your support on Steemgar, I've received great rewards from that game.
Greeting from Mexico.
@photofeeds is indeed a great project.
My regards to your daughter.
Thank you very much @cryptoctopus