SteemDev Part 3 - First SteemJS Project and Getting Started

Introduction

As I said before, I'm making my way, little by little, towards understanding and playing with the steem blockchain. I'm a beginner in development but I'm building my knowledge day after day. Here I share my journey towards becoming a SteeemDev, some of the hurdles and discoveries that I'm making along the way.

My First Project Will Be...

@photofeed is this really cool account that curate the best of the best in professional photographies on the steem blockchain. They resteem 5 times a day and I have to upvote all of them manually since there are no services that allows me to upvote someone else's resteem automatically.

This is a pain in the neck especially since our daughter is born. I get busy and forget about dealing with that detail of my life sometimes.

So that will be it, create a resteem bot for myself so that I can upvote @photofeed's resteem without having to do so manually. For that purpose, bots can be very useful...if the action you are taking with them are action you would do manually anyway, why not automate it?

If you want to follow the progress, you can keep an eye on https://github.com/RenaudGagne/resteem-bot

Connecting my computer to the Steem Blockchain

Now that has always been where I got confused...and I still am to some extent. But I made some headway today with my friend.

So here are the steps I took.

1. I installed CMDER
2. I installed Node.JS
3. Create a local directory called /resteem-bot

Then in CMDER I typed:
npm init

It asked a whole bunch of stuff which I mostly just press enter through.

Now this create a package.json so that whoever in the future plays with the resteem-bot will get all the libraries they will need to run it.

Then I enter in CMDER:

npm install steem --save

then I opened node.js to write javascript in the console.

node
and then
var steem = require("steem")
so that I have a variable to call the steem blockchain.

then whever I type steem I get the list of all of the different call I can do on the steem blockchain... THERE ARE A LOT OF THEM!

So I went over to https://github.com/steemit/steem-js/tree/master/doc to get the master documentation for all that is steemJS API calls.

I'm still lost when it comes to what to do next but at least, I'm right at the door and can poke around to learn more. There is another place I'll be looking into which is on the Steem Dev portal. The tutorial documentation on SteemJS is quite parse and some serious work is needed there to help people like me really get a grip on how to best use SteemJS. Here is the link to the current SteemJS tutorial. https://developers.steem.io/tutorials/#tutorials-javascript

Conclusion

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

― Bill Gates