As someone who is pretty new to the whole 'hacking' thing I wanted to build a thing that did a thing. Here is my experience building a Twitter bot.

So like anyone who spent a lot of time on theory and had yet to really build something on their own, I wanted to apply my new found skill on something sexy. And what could be sexier than a pre-programmed process connecting to an API and performing automated data extraction? I know I can’t think of anything either. So with my task decided, I started searching for a target for my masterpiece. There was just one small question which I had to answer before I got started: How the hell does one even start building a bot?

The answers to this question can be fast, but understanding is a bit more of a slow process. For those of you less familiar with this topic let’s start with the basics. A bot is really just a program written in any computer language you like which performs a function, and in this context that...