Build With Me Episode 0: Hello World Introductions
Official site: http://altlash.com/
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz01y1iZGnSbk7RvTb6Lz6A
Hello World! And welcome to my grand experiment. I have been a software engineer for going on a decade. I've learned a lot over my career, and I want to start to share that experience with others! I have always found blogs and YouTube tutorials about programming useful, but they have always been very basic examples. Not anymore!
I have had this idea for an adventure where I build out a full-featured, production ready web application from the ground floor. And when I say build a web application, I mean absolutely everything. We'll take a journey through software programming (both back end and front end), databases, dev ops, cloud, AWS, anything and everything. This will be a hands-on series where, if you follow every video (and these accompanying blogs), you will have your own web application!! How cool is that :)
So, what will we be developing? Is it a simple Hello World? Perhaps a small, simple game??? NOPE! We will be building a much more complex application. The vision that I have is an Auto Trading platform for stocks/mutual funds/ETFs/etc. We will utilize other brokers' APIs, such as Robinhood, to hold our accounts and funds. But, it is our application that will be putting in buy/sell orders, streaming real-time stock data, and running algorithms for us behind the scenes.
So, what features will it have in it? To start with, users will need to create accounts on various brokerages before they can utilize our application. After a user logs into our platform, they can connect their other accounts. They should be able to see account balances, open positions, past trades, etc. for each brokerage that they've linked.
The next step is to have various algorithms and toggles that the user can fine tune their behavior. I'll probably have some simple algorithms that users can pick from, but the beauty will be that users can supply their own algorithm to use. They can control which ticker symbols to run their algorithm on, how much money to use for buys/sells, toggle the algorithm on/off, what times of the day to have the algorithm run, etc. etc.
With this kind of platform, we will need to make sure we have the infrastructure to support it. We will be utilizing AWS services to build and maintain our application and its data. We will be creating brand new AWS account and starting with free service offerings that AWS provides. We will grow our infrastructure by using code pipelines to automatically detect code changes and deploy those changes to our environments. We will go over load balancing, databases, elastic IPs, the list goes on.
As you can see, this is going to be a long-running series. I hope you will find it useful and inspiring. Let me know what you guys think by leaving comments below, or on YouTube!!
PS: I know this first video is rough. It is my first time doing YouTube videos. Bear with me as I learn and grow my public speaking skill set :) I start to tweak lighting, sound, camera placement, etc. as I get more comfortable with being on camera.
PPS: Robinhood is the first API we will be consuming. Even though you won't need an account until a few videos in, please consider signing up! This is my referral link. If you sign up using it, we will both receive a free stock!! https://invite.robinhood.com/alexb1359