I first dipped my toes into programming in 2016. I was fresh out of college with a Bachelor’s in Finance and a knack for designing large interconnected Excel spreadsheets.
At the time, I was interested mostly in company valuation, forecasting out risk discounted free cash flow to equity. My spreadsheets were vast and interconnected, the opposite of a database one might say.
Downloading and importing data company by company was a tedious process at best and certainly not a timely one. If one wanted to get a comparison of all of the companies in the SP500, thing would surely have changed by the time they went through ETL process for each ticker.
Enter a move to New York. My current wife and girlfriend of the time had been offered a job at PwC, one of the Big 4 accounting firms. We made the decision to move out together.
Enter tiny flat.
One small room among four, one small bathroom, a shared, but mostly empty kitchen with a cleaning lady that came twice week. All for the low price of 1200 dollars in the heart of Queens near Jackson Heights and 72nd.
Bathroom: Dirty
Kitchen: Cramped
Roommates: Strange
By day:
- Apply for jobs
- Learn Python
- Solve HackerRank and Project Euler problems
- Work on building a FCFE program and financial data scraper
By night:
- Work in the restaurant
- Beer, pool, chess, scrabble and live jazz until 4AM
- Swipe the Metrocard
- Ride back home on the F, G and 7 trains
New York is a haze. Expensive and dirty but home to all types of people. Programming puzzle projects came and went. My valuations project grew and grew into a monstrosity.
Scraping and processing company data from zip to csv to pickle, building MatPlotLib charts after long forecasting calculations, interfacing with the unofficial Robinhood API to query current price, buy and sell from an over-design Tkinter UI.
I haven’t looked at that program for a long time, and I shudder at it’s flawed design, but it served a certain purpose and brought me to this day.
I’m sure that we all have a first project. That thing that spurred our desire and love of programming.
What was yours?
