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How I created a Twitter bot to help my career as an Optometrist

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How I created a Twitter bot to help my career as an Optometrist

Shivan
Jan 9, 2021
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How I created a Twitter bot to help my career as an Optometrist

email.shivan.xyz

Kia Ora Friend,

For a lot of people, it's been a distasteful return to work — me included.

If you still on break, please enjoy it for us.

Speaking of work, as an optometrist I complain about the fact there is no stream of optometry information. No feed you can look at for the latest information about eye health and all things optometry.

In the middle of all this complaining, I did a little stint of #100DaysOfCode. This involved learning about code, writing in code, and maybe dreaming about code... well not quite. Afterwards, I would post what I learnt or did or dreamed about in a Twitter post.

For those who may not know, Twitter is a social media network where people post tweets. These tweets are limited to 280 characters, so you have to brief. Also, these tweets contain hashtags, which help categorise posts (e.g. #100DaysOfCode, #Optometry)

How this relates to the #100DaysOfCode is that when you posted a tweet, you would include the hashtag, #100DaysOfCode.

Usually my tweets get lost and forgotten, but when you include the #100DaysOfCode, a friendly bot of the same name, #100DaysOfCode, will favourite and retweet this post. Hence giving it some life and also acting as a central point for posts related to this marathon movement.

Coming back to optometry and my complaints. The way to fix complaints is to do something about it. I've got some lemons. We can use Python to create a bot that will favourite and reshare content related to Optometry; this creates a centralised feed of novel optometry information on Twitter. And here is my lemonade.

The bot is live on Twitter, click here to check it out.

I've written a blog post on this topic, so please check it out as well.

Here is the bot on GitHub.

Did you find this useful? If you did, please forward this on to family and friends so they can find it useful too.

Thanks for reading and all the best for the week ahead.

Mā te wā,

Shivan :)


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How I created a Twitter bot to help my career as an Optometrist

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