Tag: conferences

Learnings From London Blockchain Conference 2024

The London Blockchain Conference 2024 was an event at ExCel London from 21-23 May 2024 and showed the vast potential of blockchain technology across various industries and applications. And here are my takeaways from the conference and the talks I joined:

Asset Tokenization

  • Tokenization refers to the process of converting real-world assets, such as real estate, art, or collectibles, into digital tokens on a blockchain network.
  • This enables secure and transparent trading of these assets, opening up new opportunities for investment and ownership.

AI Responsibility and Auditing

  • As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more advanced, there is a growing need to ensure they operate responsibly and without bias.
  • The conference explored ways to establish acceptance criteria for AI responsibility and leverage blockchain technology to audit AI systems, ensuring transparency and accountability.

Blockchain and AI Integration

The integration of blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies holds immense potential for creating decentralized, transparent, and trustworthy AI systems. Here are some real-world use cases:

  • AI Responsibility and Auditing: Blockchain can be used to audit AI systems, ensuring transparency and accountability. AI models, training data, and decision-making processes can be recorded on the blockchain, enabling auditing for bias, fairness, and compliance with regulations.
  • Decentralized AI: By combining blockchain and AI, it is possible to create decentralized AI systems where the AI model is trained and deployed across a network of nodes, rather than being controlled by a single entity. This can increase trust, transparency, and democratize access to AI capabilities.
  • AI-powered Supply Chains: AI and blockchain can be integrated to optimize supply chain operations. AI can analyze data from IoT sensors and blockchain can provide a tamper-proof record of transactions, enabling end-to-end visibility and automation.

Blockchain Use Cases

The conference highlighted various real-world applications of blockchain technology, including:

  • Food Supply Safety and Traceability: Blockchain can provide an immutable record of the entire food supply chain, from farm to table. This enables tracking of food products, ensuring safety, and identifying the source of contamination or quality issues.
  • Supply Chain Management and Logistics: Blockchain can streamline supply chain operations by providing a transparent and secure record of transactions, reducing paperwork, and enabling real-time tracking of goods.
  • Pharmaceutical Record-keeping and Drug Traceability: The pharmaceutical industry can leverage blockchain to maintain secure and tamper-proof records of drug manufacturing, distribution, and dispensation, preventing counterfeit drugs and ensuring patient safety.
  • Financial Services: Blockchain is being explored for applications such as cross-border payments, trade finance, and securities settlement, enabling faster and more secure transactions while reducing costs and intermediaries.
  • Identity Management: Blockchain-based identity management systems can provide individuals with control over their personal data, enabling secure and privacy-preserving sharing of identity information.

Quantum-Resistant Blockchain

  • With the potential threat of quantum computing to current cryptographic systems, the conference explored ways to make blockchain networks like Bitcoin resistant to quantum attacks, ensuring the long-term security of digital assets.

Private vs. Public Blockchains

  • Private Blockchains:
    ✅ Pros: Better control over network participants, increased transaction throughput, and enhanced privacy.
    ❌ Cons: Centralized control, reduced transparency, and potential for censorship.
  • Public Blockchains:
    ✅ Pros: Decentralized and transparent, no central authority, increased security through distributed consensus.
    ❌ Cons: Lower transaction throughput, potential for anonymity abuse, and lack of control over network participants.

    The decision to use a private or public blockchain depends on factors such as the level of trust required, the need for transparency or privacy, and the desired level of control over the network.

Consensus Mechanisms

Consensus mechanisms are essential for ensuring agreement and trust among nodes in a blockchain network. Here’s an overview of the consensus mechanisms that were mentioned during one of the talks I joined:

  • Proof of Work (PoW): Nodes compete to solve complex mathematical puzzles, and the winner gets to add the next block to the chain and earn a reward. Used in Bitcoin and Ethereum (currently).
  • Proof of Stake (PoS): Instead of computational power, nodes stake their cryptocurrency holdings to validate transactions and earn rewards. More energy-efficient than PoW.
  • Proof of Authority (PoA): A reputation-based mechanism where pre-approved nodes validate transactions based on their identity.

    The choice of consensus mechanism depends on factors such as decentralization, scalability, energy efficiency, and the level of trust required in the network.

Sad that was over, but the London Blockchain Conference 2024 showcased the transformative potential of blockchain technology across various industries and applications, from asset tokenization and AI responsibility to supply chain management and quantum-resistant blockchain networks.

Learned so much, these conferences always make me see things with other perspectives and also update myself, see what others are doing and how to solve some problems.

See you all next year 👋

Meetup On The Beach – Ministry of Test #Athens 2024

Hello hello 👋

First, I want to say a big thank you to Petros and all the Ministry of Testing Athens who received me and hosted this Meetup On The Beach – Athens on 30 May/2024 !

By far, it was the best meetup I’ve ever been to. The energy, the people, and the place were already amazing, but then adding the food, the weather, and obviously the quality of the talks and discussions just made it the icing on the cake! I don’t think they advertise how good it is 😂

Finding Your Voice – How to stop worrying and give the talk 

Sophie Küster was fantastic! She was very direct to the point and delivered simple messages that motivated people to give talks more often. Her tips were great, and they definitely resonated with me. Public speaking makes me really anxious too, and it took me a long time to gain the courage to go from blogging to speaking in public.

The tips:

  • Prepare yourself – Lots of practice, rehearsals and research
  • Be yourself and show your passion
  • Structure your presentation
  • No spelling mistakes 😬
  • Wear comfortable shoes 👠
  • Put some red lipstick on, joking this is just a reference for something Sophie often puts on to feel stronger when presenting, but you can find your own power move, like wearing a cowboy hat🤠

Thanks Sophie, hopefully see you again soon !

APIs for Browser Automation (Selenium, Cypress, Puppeteer, or Playwright)

The talk compared these four different tools for browser automation: Selenium, Cypress, Puppeteer, and Playwright. Selenium is the grandpa and senior in this space, but Cypress and Playwright are gaining more and more traction. Not surprised as they are easier to use and when working across different browsers, also the fact you don’t need to have waiting workarounds 😫

Boni Garcia even showed demos and the code comparing these tools for the same scenario ! Unfortunately my phone was taking horrible pictures, so I am sharing the slides here, much better !

Finally my Talk: A Tester’s Guide to Navigating the Wild West of Web3 Testing

As always I start first checking the level of the audience on Web3 knowledge and majority still has no idea what is Web3 or is a beginner, which makes me focus a lot in the beginning where I go through what is Web3 and Blockchain.

I always feel like I should give more examples, but then time is always something that holds me back a bit – Maybe I should remove the infrastructure part of the Blockchain and just focus on use cases ?

Then after going through the concepts, we talked about some extra resources, challenges and tools you can use when doing Web3 Tests:

  • Check this Blockchain Developer Roadmap for a comprehensive learning path (I only offered a brief overview during the talk).
  • This is a great Interactive Blockchain Demo for a hands-on understanding of blockchain functionality.
  • Here are some tools you can use for Web3 testing: Foundry, BitcoinJ, Hardhat, Embark, Web3.js, Remix-IDE, Synpress, Caliper, OpenZeppelin, Postman.

Check out the slides here !

Afterwards…

I DO LOVE the analysis part ❤️

Completely anonymous feedback at the end of the talk summarized that people loved the quiz at the end where we gave away some The Chaincademy swags for the top 3 places.

A good, friendly competition is always a good thing!

The feedback also shows that time was an issue. It seems like didn’t need that much time to discuss the infrastructure and more time was needed for use cases and explanations. Let’s see what I can do to improve for my next talk at Eurostar Conference next week !

The results can be seen here:

Who voted not sure ?

Big shout out to Angelos Mitsios for coming to me afterwards and making me think about a really good point about Blockchain Decentralisation:

While removing the middleman like banks for financial transactions with cryptocurrency is a big step, complete decentralization is difficult. We still need Internet providers and Electricity providers. Electricity can potentially be self-generated with solar panels, but internet access relies on complex infrastructure across vast distances.

And even with encryption tools like VPNs, governments can still disrupt internet access, highlighting the ongoing tension between technological freedom and government control. Ultimately, the focus should be on the practical applications of cryptocurrency (Long distance fast transactions without middleman: bank – wallet to wallet) while acknowledging the limitations of true decentralization in today’s world (Still depend on middleman: Internet and Electricity Providers)

The Speakers !

Finally met these two after seeing them talking in so many events:

Boni Garcia is an Associate Professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain. He is an official committer at the Selenium project and the creator and maintainer of several projects, such as WebDriverManager or Selenium-Jupiter. He wrote the books Mastering Software Testing with JUnit 5 and Hands-On Selenium WebDriver with Java.

Sophie is a test automation engineer at cronn GmbH, a Bonn based IT company. No stranger to the universe’s gut punches, she is passionate about improving awareness and communication about mental health and self-care.

That’s all 👋 Meet you next week at Eurostar in Stockholm and Geek 2024 – EE Conference in London and my last conference of the year Automationstar in Vienna !