Grandma’s Bboy (a cat-twitter ‘stan’ bot)

That has to be a pretty common theme among the parents and grandparents of the Zoomers and Millennials (and sure, you Gen-X’ers out there, I didn’t forget about you). It’s not like my grandma doesn’t know how to use the phone, she figured out how to send group messages and gifs over MMS without asking and she even downloaded a few apps. The ‘problem’ is that she just doesn’t like to carry it around everywhere and she has no reason to stay attached to it – since she doesn’t have a Twitter account – the main reason she uses it is to call and text.

Being the angelic grandson that I am, anytime I see her I show her dozens of pictures from the cat personality accounts on Twitter – we are both cat enthusiasts (and lovers of all animals, but especially cats). I asked one day if she would like me to send her pictures of the cats from time to time – obviously this was a home run idea, I just had to figure out how to do it regularly and without me downloading them to my phone to send over MMS. Duhhhh, TwitterAPI and Cronman to the automation rescue.

I started following Ellen and her cat Bilbo some time in 2019, and have since extended my count of cat twitter pages. My grandma doesn’t need to get a twitter account just to see these cats – this bboybot (spelled that way in homage to the good bboy) works to pull down multiple pictures of Bilbo and Co. on a monthly schedule, and then each day of that month sends my grandma a text with a few pictures of the cats. This was a really fun and easy way to play with the Twitter API again, use my Twilio credits, and earn a crazy number of brownie points – if you would like to send someone pictures like this please try out the repo.