Learning Web Development (1)

Introduction

After having worked as a database professional for years I decided it is time to look ahead and think what I would like to be doing in the future. Of course I still love databases but I have always been a little jealous of my programmer friends who are able to create beautifully designed and functional websites from scratch.

So, it is time for me to start learning on this new track: and to make sure what I am learning also stays around in my head I am creating this next series of blog posts in which I will document my learnings. Of course, I will be needing some homework exercises. Or..

Cryptocurrency

The past years I have been watching the Bitcoin/Altcoin market on and off, and I own a few Euros worth of TRX and Ether. I sometimes fantasize about building a little trading bot that would automatically buy and sell coins at the right moments.

Of course, there are all kinds of trading bots around, with all kinds of fancy algorithms but I am not interested in learning those. I would be happy if I had a website where I can enter a few values, say, for a day or a week like : “If TRX goes below 0.009 dollars then buy 50 dollars worth of TRX.”

Then I would need an application to check these values and execute a trade if the conditions are met. For this I could use the Gekko open source trading bot or one of its forks.

The pet project

So that will be the little pet project then. Doing it this way assures I am focusing mostly on developing my own web app without concerning myself with the implementation of a trading bot and interfacing with bitcoin exchanges and such.

I will be needing:

  • A website
    • For entering values
    • And maybe later creating some reporting dashboards
  • A database
    • For storing the entered values
    • And maybe later some results
    • And maybe later doing something with authentication and user profiles
  • Gekko trading bot
    • To simulate automatic trading
    • A Gekko strategy that uses the data the website stored in the database: this strategy makes an evaluation and tells Gekko to buy or sell. I need to write this part so Gekko can interface with my web api.
  • Web API
    • So Gekko has access to the data

Next steps

The coming weeks I will be going on this journey, journaling one or more topics per post each time. I will make a little design if needed, give some code examples and of course put all code on my GitHub page Azure Devops page. Stay tuned..