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Most of the programs I wrote were for my own needs. I've open-sourced many of them, but some are really just for me and closed-source: - A scraper to get thous

Most of the programs I wrote were for my own needs. I've open-sourced many of them, but some are really just for me and closed-source: - A scraper to get thousands of quiz questions from popular German TV shows and then import them into an Anki deck. - Sync app between Foobar2000 and Plex playlists. - A script to enter Steam giveaways for me. After winning over 1000 Steam games and DLCs, I've turned the script off (mainly due to playing more console games lately). I might do a write-up about this one someday. - A movie management web app. It's been running for 7 years with low maintenance effort.

ornornor 5y ago
> enter Steam giveaways What are these? Are they run by steam itself or from random people? I got some results searching, but nothing that looked like it’s an “official” thing.
- darekkay 5y ago
  I was using SteamGifts [0], but there are more. It's not an official Valve platform. The giveaways mostly come from regular people, usually offering leftover keys from game bundles. Some game developers also drop hundreds of keys in a single giveaway - those are listed at the top and provide some visibility/marketing for them. From a user perspective, you are automatically given some "entry points" every time a new giveaway is created (to a max. cap) and you are free to spend them however you want (higher game value = more entry points required). There never was a way to get more "entry points" by paying money. People creating giveaways can set a minimum "user level" to enter the giveaway. You can only get higher levels by creating a giveaway yourself. So the more you contribute, the better games and the less entries you can expect. In summary, it is just a matter of the number of your giveaway entries to win something. So I've written a bot to enter giveaways automatically, preferring ones with the least entries to get a higher chance of winning. For reference, "I" have entered 289k giveaways and won ~1070 games since 2013 (with a fully automatic bot since ~2016). [0] https://www.steamgifts.com/ https://www.steamgifts.com/

ornornor 5y ago

> enter Steam giveaways What are these? Are they run by steam itself or from random people? I got some results searching, but nothing that looked like it’s an “official” thing.

darekkay 5y ago
I was using SteamGifts [0], but there are more. It's not an official Valve platform. The giveaways mostly come from regular people, usually offering leftover keys from game bundles. Some game developers also drop hundreds of keys in a single giveaway - those are listed at the top and provide some visibility/marketing for them. From a user perspective, you are automatically given some "entry points" every time a new giveaway is created (to a max. cap) and you are free to spend them however you want (higher game value = more entry points required). There never was a way to get more "entry points" by paying money. People creating giveaways can set a minimum "user level" to enter the giveaway. You can only get higher levels by creating a giveaway yourself. So the more you contribute, the better games and the less entries you can expect. In summary, it is just a matter of the number of your giveaway entries to win something. So I've written a bot to enter giveaways automatically, preferring ones with the least entries to get a higher chance of winning. For reference, "I" have entered 289k giveaways and won ~1070 games since 2013 (with a fully automatic bot since ~2016). [0] https://www.steamgifts.com/ https://www.steamgifts.com/