How I Accidentally Built an OpenSource — Algo Trading Platform

This is the story of how a simple weekend experiment unintentionally became OpenAlgo — a now thriving, open-source algo trading platform built for traders, by traders.

Originally created to automate my own Amibroker-based trades using Flask, OpenAlgo grew far beyond its initial scope. Today, it supports 20+ brokers, integrates with Amibroker, TradingView, Excel, Chrome, Python and Node SDK and serves as a core automation engine for both scalpers and strategy developers. The most powerful part? It’s driven entirely by the community and rapidly evolving with AI integrations — from prompt-based strategy building to auto-coding broker modules.

In this session, I’ll walk you through:

• How OpenAlgo accidentally started and why it resonated with the trading community

• Real engineering lessons from handling broker APIs, data mismatches, and websocket logic

• What it means to be community-first — shaping roadmaps based on Discord chats, GitHub issues, and user feedback

• How we’re now blending AI tools to simplify algo creation, backtesting, and execution logic

• What building in public taught me about trust, transparency, and sustainability

Whether you're a trader, a tinkerer, or someone curious about what it takes to run an open-source project with real-world adoption — this talk is an honest, technical yet beginner-friendly journey into open-source evolution.

• From Side Project to FOSS: How a personal automation script snowballed into a full-fledged open-source trading platform.

• Technical Lessons: Key architectural decisions, mistakes made, and how we handled real-world constraints like broker API

• Community-Led Development: How feedback from real traders shaped the roadmap more than any internal plan.

• Sustainability in FOSS: The challenges of maintaining an open-source project solo, and what keeps it going.

• Actionable Insights: How others can start small, ship early, and build public-facing tools that actually get used.