For simplicity I will refer to Hive as rebranding of Steem and when I say Hive I mean its entire history even before HF23. Yesterday I received a comment from @hivebuzz by @arcange that reminded me I have been on Hive for 3 years. I have been on the blockchain for 3 years. Time flies indeed.
Hive has many features that attract people like myself. Among them is learning new skills. If you have been following my posts recently, you would know that I like writing codes in python to automate things. But you may not know that I have become familiar with Python and started learning how to code is here on Hive.
My early days on Hive were heavily involved with Curie and curation. As soon as I discovered Curie, I was more interested in curating than blogging. Not everybody have blogging skills. But luckily Hive is not only about blogging. I have made many friends among curators who would spends hours on daily basis to find talents and makes sure they get rewarded handsomely.
One of the curators, @locikll introduced me to python. Initially I wanted to learn more python to make curating more efficient. Curating the entire blockchain involves a lot of repetitive moves. Combining automation to discover brilliant posts makes the process more efficient. Later, I was introduced to HiveSQL by @carlgnash and @markangeltrueman. Back then HiveSQL was affordable for an average curator. It might be a bit more expensive these days. It has always been a joy to use HiveSQL combined with python.
Let me explain just to give an idea how one of my codes would help with curating. I have python code that would utilize HiveSQL. I would run it on a daily basis. It would filter out the posts that are most likely to be quality posts. But still return about 400-500 posts. Then it would open up 50 tabs at a time with all the posts. I would go through every single tab manually, read, evaluate, and keep the ones I would consider for suggesting for Curie. Utilizing shot-cut keys to close the tabs and move to the next one would also speed up the process. In no time I would be able to go through about 500 posts. Submit the ones I chose to Curie and move on the next day of curation. Later, I even purchased a special mouse, that I used for curating. It is a ring mouse with some keys that can be assigned to certain function.
As I was exploring python and learning more, I wrote some bot codes for Steem.chat and later for discord. None of those projects were completed. But they worked for a certain time period as intended. The problem I constantly keep facing is the ugly code. Even if the codes work well at the time they are needed, over some period of time they become unusable, because I don't know what their functions were and they were not written in a fashion to be reused.
The reason is simple. When I start writing a code, initially I try to plan to make it reusable in future codes, organize it a little bit. But once codes starts getting longer, more complicated, I find myself rushing to finish and keep getting various errors. Whenever errors occur, there is always a simpler approach to take, that is simpler, sort of a patch, but ends up making code hard to read when revisited at a later time.
If you have been following my automating Stock Prices Traders Diary blog posts recently, you would know that I was working on automating record keeping of watched stock prices. Today I was able to finish the project. But end result ended up being an ugly code. But it works.
What do I mean with an ugly code? It is a code that if someone else read it probably would be confused and decides that it is more efficient to rewrite it from the scratch. Not only that, it is a code that I myself probably would have hard time understand what I was trying to do when I read it a month from now.
I was able to finish the project and get the code to work as intended. For that to happen though I had to compromise, make patches to fix errors, and not organizing it well so it can be reused in the future. I do see a lot of potential in the skills I learnt though, and I believe they will help me develop more based on them. Maybe I will revisit this code and improve to make it more readable and reusable in the future. For now, I will keep it, as it fulfills the functions I need.
I will attach the screenshots of the code below. You be the judge how ugly it is.
