The project is coming along nicely. Sprint # 2 was my big sprint in reality and on the project plan. I was able to get our app up and running end to end – upload a new algorithm, create a project, save it to the file system and database, run a backtest on the project, save the results to the file system and database, and query the database for the results. For some background, my team is working on a local UI for an algorithm testing engine https://www.quantconnect.com. You basically write an algorithm that tries to predict the best times to buy and sell assets in the stock market and backtest it against historical market data.
During the last few weeks, I’ve been able to learn a lot about different technologies – from AWS services like Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), Relational Database Service (RDS), Elastic Beanstalk (EB), and App Runner. EC2 is basically a cloud computer that runs any number of different systems, but the free one uses a Linux OS called Amazon Linux 2. The RDS is a simple relational database that also runs any number of different db servers; we configured ours with MariaDB. The other services are different services that help you host your web apps…supposedly with a single click and upload but I still haven’t figured out how to format our app to work there. All of these AWS services have free tiers so you can experiment and play around but much more than that and you’ll have to start paying.
This last sprint, has really been spent just updating my code for optimization, error handling, and bugs. I feel like this project so far has been a great opportunity to tie all the different technologies we’ve learned through the course of the program in a way that encourages exploration and experimentation.
