Hello Steemit,
My name's Joe. I'm an office worker who moved from the West Coast to the Midwest earlier this year. I'm a semi-retired YouTuber and part-time Twitch streamer (links down below if they suit your fancy). I've got a following of about 13,000 people between the two platforms (there's definitely some overlap), and I am known for playing and making tutorials for Pokemon for the Nintendo 3DS as a competitive battler, as well as running what's essentially a large fantasy draft league but for battlers (more on that in another post).
I've always been a major politics/news junkie, and more recently have been getting into cryptocurrency trading, so I'm going to do things a little differently than on my old channels and use Steemit/D-Tube as a place where I can talk about and make content for ALL my interests, rather than just some. If that suits your fancy, feel free to follow me here, as I'll definitely have a lot of content on the way. Some reposting at first, but mostly new stuff.
I'm going to tell a quick work story if only to demonstrate my thought process. In very vague terms for privacy concerns, this story is about how I've automated my job to the point where I have a lot of time to browse Steemit at work, in addition to formulating ideas for content. I work as an analyst and am a temp employee, but my job is 10% problem solving of some special cases of data, and 90% copy/pasting and rapid fire clicking, so almost more data entry than actual data processing. I make good money, and the job does indeed need to be done for the benefit of the company's archaic system, but it's neither invigorating nor is it cognitively beneficial as it's a sluggish repetition of data clicks.
If you're a whiz for automation, then this is going to sound like nothing for you, but my first challenge was finding a program that wasn't blocked by my draconian IT department, and this step actually took months to do as 5-6 total days of searching came up empty handed. I had used Autohotkey to help me script a simple process in a past job, but that wasn't going to help me much here since it was a blocked program. The IT department basically required permissions for anything needing installation, and the only thing I had ever gotten approved was google chrome. Couldn't bring in flash drives, nothing. Fairly standard stuff for a tight security office environment.
Yesterday I stumbled upon an alternative to Autohotkey called AutoIt, and while it was indeed blocked by the IT department, and I had tried 3 different failed methods to get around that, it did have a portable version online that existed, including its script writer. I downloaded that and got to work.
For those who aren't well based in code (I'm right there with you, by the way), assume that the code used is similar to the Visual Basic Language, and think nothing else of it. Basically I input commands from a wiki that I was referencing and coming up with code to
A) Find coordinates of where my mouse is in order to simulate the clicking steps I use
B) Write a second script using those coordinates to move my mouse and click in order, copying two items of data that needed to be processed and pasting them during this process.
C) Take a break for half a second or so between actions to account for system loading time.
D) Loop back around once one row of data was processed as many times as could be maintained without major error.
After about two hours sitting at my desk yesterday plugging away at this code, I finally got my masterpiece that I needed to basically write away my job. The best part is, nobody else in my department would be able to replicate this because A) I wouldn't share the portable application if asked, and B) without that application, nobody can replicate this process automatically, so my job is secure.
So now after just today being approved for my SteemIt account, I'm proud to say I have my job automated, and will be able to join you in what I believe has a very strong possibility of revolutionizing how we produce and consume content.
