Project Update - 1

Everyone of us think(or worry) about future, especially in 30s. Likewise, I worry about financial stability of my future. The retirement comes top of the list among the various worries. And so, I started investement. The investment includes various vahicles - Mutual fund, stocks and fixed components. Investing is a beast; tracking the investment is like taming the beast. For tracking the progress there are (literally) endless apps coming into to market. You must either trade in your data or pay for some freemium features.

Even after trying the apps to track the progress, I’m not content. Finally, I went back to good old Excel Google Sheet. The Sheet is armed with Google Finance, with right formulae we can fetch latest price/NAV. It’s friction-less. However, Google is a giant and it feasts on the data. Its like deal with the devil; you swap your data for availability & usability. With, increased dependence on Google is always a risk.

One of the app that comes very close to fulfilling all my requirements is Artos, from an independent developer. This is an Android app that tracks our investment, though with some bugs. This app comes under freemium model, features like net worth vs invested amount requires ₹500. I was reluctant to pay for the feature, even though it not a big amount, on converting it is ~$6.

Scratching my own itch

As I mentioned, Artos had some bugs. I got annoyed and while staring at it hopelessly, some inner voice asked me to empathise with the developer. The developer frequently replies to queries in subreddits. While trying to understand the difficulties that’s involved in building an app, it stuck to me why not create our own app to track our investment?. Also, I’m getting rusty with my Parseltongue (ability to program in Python). I was learning R and was looking to build something instead of getting wrapped in tutorial hell.

Slowly, the above ideas snowballed, during one of the pooing session it morphed and looked like a viable product, at least for my personal usage. Also, if realized it would impart positively impact on my fluency in R language as well. That’s how this project is born.

10,000 ft Overview of the project

As mentioned its 10,000 ft overview, actual implementation involves heavy homework. Some of the items that needs to be sorted can be,

1. Are there any APIs available to fetch NAV changes on Mutual fund and stocks, preferrably free?
2. There are numerous DBs available in market, even if we filter out only the free and open source databases. Among them which one will be suitable for our requirement.
3. How to integrated R and Python ?

Roadmap - things to achieve

Writing a code can be either a spaghetti code, which just works or well commented human readable code. Most of my previous projects got fizzled out thanks to the former methodology. I was not aligned to the process, instead I was writing code to reach the goal. Lack of process resulted in,

1. I couldn’t recall reason behind logic (lack of commenting)
2. After a break of few days, I would need to start from the fresh and tend to lose track of progress.
3. Overwriting main branch resulting in losing the code, permanently (not using branch feature).
4. Some minor change breaking the entire setup (lack of unit testing)
5. Not learning/using Github Actions, Pre-commits and other essentials that helps make the life easier.
6. Trying to do many thing and burning out before achieving the core functionality (not setting the proper goals)

This time I’m sure the best practices is going to be followed, even if it takes longer time to learn and implement. One of the episode from Talk Python to me podcast on creation and maintenance, got me started with the project.

One more thing, the progress of this project will be shared in this series of blog posts, with every milestone. This way I can archive my thoughts. This blog posts should help me look back and realise whether there are any improvements of the self.

The beginning of the long road

git init pf-dashboard

Thus, the new repo has been initalised.

This is most ambitious side project, yet. The final product should be part of my Data Science portfolio, it’s always good to think big, lets achieve bigger 🙏.