I've been wanting to try my hand at writing a steem-bot for a while. 2017 is slowly coming to an end, @googlyeyes has taken over the #GooglyPrize movement, I finally have some long needed spare time and motivation available again, it's time to dive into something new.

Cryptokitties are all the rage lately, my last few bitcoin related posts had cat images in them, but I swear this is totally a coincidence! It's winter and cold here and don't you just get a craving to cuddle with a cute fluffy little kitten? I sure do!

It was quite a challenge, I've never really used python for much before, that felt kind of awkward, and the documentation for the steem-python library isn't very extensive at all to say the least.

Oh yeah, and of course I started developing it with piston-lib initially, just to eventually learn that it was outdated and steemit inc had ported it over to steem-python which they now maintain as an "official" library... that was kind of a headache... but still, here we are...

@steemkitten is making her first baby steps!

She's not very smart yet, but she's already making friends.

@steemkitten will remember who's been nice to her and she'll come by to cuddle her friends from time to time. When she hasn't received any cuddles herself in a while, she'll start begging for attention on posts in the #cats category.

I've been letting her stroll around for a bit already and she's been getting to know almost 100 fellow steemians by now.

I plan to continue improving her decision making process and I want to give her some personality. For now it's really all just rudimentary score-keeping and a very basic branching algorithm.

I invite you to give her a visit and see for yourself. If you want to befriend her, just give her a cuddle... she'll remember!

Let me know what you think!

Is this just more spam or is it actually cute?

I know there are already a lot of annoying bots out there and I am myself a bit unsure of how I ultimately feel about all of these automated replies and the appeal of non-human curation and voting.

But I hope @steemkitten will make some people smile. As she grows and learns new things, develops a personality, maybe I can train her to provide a fun interactive experience, a cuddly stray kitten, exploring the blockchain, sharing the love.