This was the second (third?) time around in bot-making for me, and I was struck by how much just a little more programming experience makes the task so much less daunting. It helped that the tutorial was put together in such an easy to use platform. Coding and hosting environments are still elusive to me (are there free versions? How do we get access to them?). The last time I created a bot a couple years ago (Casual Observer @FlyOnTheWallBot, which is broken right now because Twitter changed their OAuth protocols and I didn’t realize it), I wrote it in Google script so that I could run it from Google Drive without worrying about it. But Google script feels much less intuitive than Python feels to me now, and seems to have much fewer resources in terms of existing libraries to import. When we talked about how to search Twitter and use its results at the end of the workshop, I was awed at how much easier it would be than the script I wrote (with lots of help from web searching, my c.s. boyfriend, and appropriating parts of code from other bot-markers). Certainly I’m nowhere near pro-status when it comes to bot-making, but I feel like I have a lot of ideas that could viably be realized with a bit of work and time, and that’s super exciting!