Kickstart with BD Twitter Community Launch

Brac University Computer Club (BUCC) organized a webinar titled “ Kickstart with BD Twitter Community Launch '' on 14th August 2021. Md. Muhtadee Faiaz Khan Soumik, President of BUCC, was in charge of presenting the complete webinar. This event was featured by Suhem Parack, Developer Relations for Academic Research of Twitter, and Aba Micah, the Community Manager at Developer Advocate at Twitter. MD. Rawha Mikdad Chowdhury, Co-lead of Twitter Developer Community Bangladesh and former Vice President of BUCC was also present at the webinar. As a special guest, the country lead for Kotlin Developers Bangladesh and Twitter Dev Community Bangladesh, Mr. Mohius Sunnat also joined the webinar. Twitter will release its APIs for the first time in Bangladesh, hence the honorable guests shared the concept with the audience.

At first, Mr. Parack introduced the concept of Twitter API to the audience. The Twitter API is a methodical way to interact with Twitter and it provides developers with the ability to learn from and engage with the internal functions of Twitter. He also added that twitter is a medium for popular, trendy topics, and students and researchers can use APIs to collect data and make apps and bots.
Mr. Parack then proceeded to demonstrate some apps which were made using Twitter APIs. He showed how students in India made a crisis-management app to help COVID patients in the country. Students can avail tweets for their research, from an earlier point in time by using the historical endpoint. One can also capture tweets in real-time using two endpoints; sample stream which shows real-time tweets in a certain category and filtered stream which groups all recent tweets. To all the students, he emphasized how to apply to open a Twitter Developer Account, with which all these APIs would be accessible. He then talked more about the usage of Twitter Developer account, with which APIs can be used for research activities. He then showed several codes on how to manipulate and use APIs according to our interest. After this, he showed a course which starts from scratch to use Twitter APIs.

Before wrapping up the session, he took some questions from the students such as queries regarding its purpose, functionality, and possible future uses. Students were very intrigued regarding the prospects of Twitter APIs and opening a developer account. They were interested in different properties of APIs, e.g whether it could get data from private accounts, if researchers could use it to mitigate misinformation over Twitter and if APIs are free and so on. Students also showed serious interest in the varieties of apps shown in the seminar made using APIs. Suhem also had some advice for people with no prior coding experience, as he said they can use Postman to access the APIs. As the webinar came to an end, MD. Rawha Mikdad Chowdhury, Co-lead of Twitter Developer Community Bangladesh and former Vice President of BUCC, heartily thanked the guests for this informative session. Finally, after exchanging greetings with the honorable guests, the host brought down the curtains to the session by thanking the guests, and all the participants of this event.