Folio for Your Stock Investments
Slightly over halfway through the program, the Carbon group knew that the expectation of what they were going to build would be set high. The goal of the project was to write a web application aimed at helping an every day person manage their investments. The entire class built an awesome web application integrating with multiple technologies that allows someone to effectively manage their stock portfolio for the next 40 years. Assigned with the task, student project lead for the team, Chris Hoelter, gives us insight into what his group went through while creating this project:
“Building a valuable piece of software is always a challenging task—particularly when using technology you have no experience with and have only been coding for two months. That is the position I and six other classmates were in when we began our last project: portfolio investment software built on the ASP.NET platform.
Folio
Our project focused specifically on a stock portfolio. A user can create one or more portfolios adding stocks that they own to them. We then provide real-time financial data relevant to the portfolio, financial analysis of the portfolio, and a Monte-Carlo simulation to predict the future outcome of their portfolio composition. These calculations are performed by leveraging historical stock data accessible through Yahoo’s finance API.
The most daunting part of this project was not the fact that we had never used the ASP.NET framework, or that most of us had no background in finance. Working effectively as such a large group was the initially the most challenging. Our communication and Git skills were put to the test. Fortunately, we quickly fell into a rhythm and were able to produce an end-product with a level of polish greater than what could have been accomplished with the sum of our individual abilities.
Matt Heller was essential for the development of our calculations with his background in Finance. Chad Hilke and Josh Oliver, our “senior YQL dev”, integrated the Yahoo API calls and real-time data feeds, Alex Morask turned our business logic into a functional ASP platform, Aaron DeSanctis handled the UI website design, and Robert Moon wrote unit-tests across the breadth of our project ensuring we wrote maintainable clean code.
Now, I cannot speak on behalf of the entire team, but when I began coding at the start of the devCodeCamp program I never imagined being able to complete a project of this complexity after only a couple of months experience. The unimaginable took one week to complete. I wonder what next will bring…”
Looking at the final product, the feature that really stood out to me, was the completion of the Monte Carlo Analysis simulation, which allows people to see in a human friendly way what if I invested this much into here, and it tells you the most average or most likely scenario.
All in all, what happened here with this project short sells the term mind-blowing considering that it was put together in only one week. Hats off to the Carbon Generation
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