Learning to Use Terminal / GitHub / Ruby!

My journey to creating @oddbot !

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Hello friends! I recently decided I want to learn how to create a bidding bot on Steemit that would be in the lineage of Dr. Otto (the basis for @booster, @bellyrub, @discordia, & @lovejuice.) with a few added features. Dr. Otto was created by the gifted programmer @inertia. The name of the variation I am creating is @oddbot and it will have an interesting personality that results in it making quirky decisions on what to do with the SBD that it receives.

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For example, it may decide to convert the SBD it receives into STEEM and power it up to the people that use it. Or, it may decide to randomly select one person that used it in the past 24 hours and award them the full amount of SBD. Or, it may trade for SBD and power it up to @oddbot. Or, it may use the SBD to purchase SP delegation from @minnowbooster. You get the idea, there will be many different creative actions that it may perform with the SBD it receives :) It will make posts declaring its decision at the end of a certain time period, maybe every 48 or 72 hours.

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It will be a bidding bot for minnows, because it will only have a few thousand SP. It will hopefully also have unusual and creative messages that it leaves as its comments for using its service. As well, it will curate some of the posts upvoted with the service manually by resteeming it and/or making posts promoting it. The focus will be helping minnows that make great original content to get noticed! So, much of what is put into it will go back to those who engage with it. Its SP will most likely be kept low so that it's not useful to dolphins and whales, only to minnows. Over time, it may evolve and this may change, however, its focus will always be creativity, and highlighting excellent original content.

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There's just one little problem...

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Scripts... and more scripts..!

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Installing homebrew

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"


Installing rbenv

 $ git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
$ echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile

Installing ruby

$ rbenv install 2.0.0-p247

Installing radiator

gem 'radiator', github: 'inertia186/radiator'
$ bundle install
require 'radiator'
api = Radiator::Api.new
response = api.get_dynamic_global_properties
response.result.virtual_supply
=> "135377049.603 STEEM"

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I haven't done any programming in 10+ years...

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Excepting markdown and html, I haven't done any programming in a loooong time. And none of it was ever on a Mac, which I now use. When I was a kid I learned Basic, Visual Basic, Flash, & Html on Windows. So now it's time to start from "square one" learning basic commands in Terminal, Github and Ruby. Then I need to understand the basics of Radiator (API client that accesses the STEEM blockchain also invented by @inertia) and understand the basics of how the Dr. Otto template works.

After that will come the more difficult part because I need to find out how to write the code (in Ruby) to create different options for @oddbot 's actions at the end of each specified period. Honestly, it seems a little overly ambitious, but that leads me to the next point:

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I welcome any help / advise on the best way to go about it!

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I definitely welcome any links to tutorials, articles, etc. that are pertinent to learning to use Terminal, GitHub, & Ruby. I also would love some contacts experienced in programming in Ruby that I could toss ideas back and forth with. In fact, let's be honest, I'm going to NEED help to get this done. I'm a complete novice at this point, so I expect the learning curve to be steep. @oddbot is an experiment and an excuse to increase my programming skills after a long hiatus. It's also an idea that I believe could benefit the Steemit community, minnows in particular! The quicker it gets functioning, the quicker we can hopefully enrich the Steemit community with a bot that has quite a bit of spice to it ;)

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One day @oddbot shall be activated!

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Wholeness,
@d-pend
8/4/17

All images are free domain use.

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Thanks for reading this update blog about my aspirations for @oddbot! What do you think about my idea? Have any suggestions for ways an odd, quirky, eccentric bidding bot ought to behave? Have any links or contacts for me that may help as I learn? Have any general questions? General statements? Please leave them in the comments below!!!

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Important message: do NOT send any SBD or STEEM to @oddbot unless it is a donation for development. It's not yet active and won't be for a while!