My talk at GeeCon Prague 2018

Last Thursday on October 18th, I had the pleasure and excitement to present for the first time in a conference! It was GeeCon Prague and the organization plus the quality of the talks was really good, I highly recommend it to everyone! Something that I found to be really productive was that most speakers had a practical approach to their presentations, meaning a lot of code snippets and discussion with the crowd was there. Also new ‘toys’ where presented like project helidon and micronaut.

My subject was about “Creating bots during BTC gold rush”. To give you a summary, during 2017 BTC price surged from about 1k$ to 20k$ dollars within a years time! In those frenzy days, a funny story happened. Many people tried to promote (shill) their favorite coins. This usually worked for those with many followers. One of those people was John McAfee. When he started promoting coins, price doubled within a matter of minutes. So, having a programming background got me thinking, well why not create a twitter crawler to extract the coin ticker symbol and place an order to a crypto exchange (Bittrex)? And that’s what I did and it failed miserably :-). Nevertheless the excitement and joy I received from my creation was unparallel! Also gave a lot of perspective on what was happening during that time in the cryptocurrency space and pointed the dangers of crypto markets. Closed with a few thought on why people should use available APIs and experiment with them.

  • Slides from the presentation can be found here
  • The code is also available in this repo
  • My presentation can be seen here
  • All GeeCon Prague 2018 talks can be seen here

Next GeeCon will be held in Krakow Poland, so I am looking forward to it as well!