Background

My first semester pursuing my CS degree, I applied to join “ACM Projects”, a group which would have you build a project over the course of a semester and present them in a pitch competition at the end. After going through two rounds of interviews, I was accepted. I later learned that the acceptance rate was only 10% of the total applicants, so I wasn’t going to let the opportunity go to waste. We had a group leader, a more experienced member of this branch of ACM, and a four other group members, making six of us in total

The Idea

We were given the prompt of building something to do with Crypto Currencies, this was 2018 after all, and the fervor had never been higher. After spending some time brainstorming I floated the idea of somehow making it easier for people new to the scene to get a condensed idea of the state of particular currencies, a snapshot of what it is, and how people feel about it.

The idea turned into “Crypo-Context”, we would map the price of crypto currencies, and compare it to IBM “Watson’s” tone analysis software with input data from queries on Twitter and Reddit surround those particular currencies.

The Development

I chose to pursue the backend development working with two other members in particular. Over the course of the semester, we were tasked with learning, understanding, and implementing a MEAN (Mongo.DB, Express, Angular.JS, and Node.JS) stack website. I spent a lot of my free time watching videos and going through Coursera courses on the MEAN stack. Finally, with only a few days left, we sprinted and quickly implemented all the features we wanted. I had implemented the use of the graphing library we used to represent the stocks, and the IBM library to get the tone-of-voice data. Additionally, I wrote the backend javascript which scraped the latest tweets about each coin. The website used Bootstrap and Node.JS Libraries to build a website that could be viewed on mobile, or desktop computers. In the end, I had developed a flexible enough backend framework, such that we could generate and graph information from 4,732 different crypto coins, from 102 different exchanges (dollar, euro, etc).

The Pitch (and Awards)

We ended up pitching our product to a panel of experts, including industry leaders, and celebrated professors at our university. Out of a total 5 very competitive team submissions, our team were the winners of “ACM Projects Spring 2018”. One judge told us they could see us going on and doing great things, and I certainly hope he was right.

To read more about that pitch night, you can read more about it here