I would recommend to manually do it as the code base is evolving and the manual implementation will also give an opportunity to review the code base and find other areas of improvement. ie it will double as a peer code review. #162 is a starting point.
What
PEP-8 is from the Zen of Python. For the non-religious, non-zen minds, a definition is : A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds
Why
PEP-8 gives a universal, easy to understand coding style to Python code. Further the popular IDEs has support for this.
This will help the maintainability of the code base and help to increase community contributions.
Steemit's other repostories
In the case of Steemit code base, Steen-Python is PEP8 compliant. CircleCI is running tests for the same. Eg: https://circleci.com/gh/steemit/steem-python/584
Tests are included in the case of steam-python : https://github.com/steemit/steem-python/blob/267d41e4c9f4d7d01fa85ecd5bef9f3fdbfc7793/setup.py
How to do it ?
I would recommend to manually do it as the code base is evolving and the manual implementation will also give an opportunity to review the code base and find other areas of improvement. ie it will double as a peer code review. #162 is a starting point.