In 2016, as a Freshman at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I had the pleasure of attending the annual HackIllinois programming competition. Having just completed my foundational programming course, with no real skills to speak of, I set out to create a project I could present at the conclusion of the competition. After finding a library called Tweepy that allowed programs to interface with Twitter, I set out to create an automated Twitter Bot that could be customized and deployed at scale to any number of themed Twitter accounts. As part of this project I taught myself Python over the course of the weekend, marking the first new programming language I learned of my own initiative.
In 2018, as part of CS Sail, a new student recruitment initative by the UIUC CS Department, I reconfigured my initial project into Sail-bot and presented it to prospective students. Along with the presentation was a live coding demonstation, showing attendees what could be accomplished with only a single semester of CS education at Illinois.
Today, Sail-bot is unfortunately no longer actively maintained. The code remains in my GitHub repository as a reminder of where I started, and a testament to legacy this code has left within my career.