How quickly can Dave Cross put together a Twitter bot that tweets the Apollo 11 mission in real time (well, shifted by fifty years)? And, honestly, how useful is that?
Speaker: Dave Cross
- Discusses his interest in space and the 50th anniversary of Apollo
11’s moon landing.
- Shares his idea of creating a Twitter bot to celebrate the
anniversary by tweeting the mission timeline in real-time, plus 50
years.
- Explains how he built the bot in about 90 minutes.
- Needed: Data to tweet, code to implement tweeting, images to make
the Twitter account visually appealing.
- Found Apollo 11 mission timeline data on NASA’s website and used it
for the bot’s tweets.
- Used Net::Twitter on CPAN for easy coding.
- Found freely licensed images from NASA for the bot’s visuals.
- Deployed the bot using a simple Cron job running on a real computer
due to the limited time.
- Encountered and fixed issues with the bot’s tweets, including a
Unicode fail on the most important tweet in the series.
- Invites audience to follow the bot, @Apollo11at50, to see the remaining
tweets and his personal account for future updates.
Thoughts on the Talk: - Interesting to learn how
quickly a Twitter bot can be built with the right tools and resources. -
Useful for understanding the basic components required to build a bot:
data, code, and visuals. - Inspiring for those interested in
commemorating historical events in innovative, digital ways.
This summary has been generated by ChatGPT