Posts

Wow today I learned that 1 radian is actually the angle created by the length of the radius on a circle. And that 180degrees is simply 3.14 radians. Can’t believe I’ve never known this relationship.

So I was researching for ways to get a company’s historical financials data because I hate clicking through pages of shitty UI and downloading files and all that when all I need is a couple of numbers - when I stumbled upon this open source project called OpenBB. To be fair, this wasn’t the first thing that came up in my endeavour. Basically, I want to be able to very quickly get the historical ratios, balance sheet, and income statement of a company, ideally through a light weight interface like the command line. Initially I thought I was going to use a couple of APIs and then cleaning the data through jq or something similar (which is still possible), and that led me to APIs like FinancialModelingPrep and EODHD. EODHD’s response design is more like a ‘bulk export’ approach, where with one call you get every single historical data of a company, whereas FMP’s responses are more streamlined and tailored to a specific need. The only thing is, with the free version, I could only get 5 years of historical data, whereas I need the data of way more years, so I was considering upgrading. Before commiting to it, I decided to look around to see if there are any alternatives to this, either in terms of workflow or in terms of data. ...

So, recently I was exploring options for quickly spinning up an authentication system for a NextJs environment, where I stumbled upon next-auth. Spinning it up ‘quickly’ is important, because I intend to use this framework mostly for the MVP stages of a project, and I don’t want to spend too much time configuring it. I have to admit, understanding it at first was not so easy, because authentication necessarily brings along with it a lot of different parts. Luckily, resources like these and these helped. ...

So whilst wiring up my the frontend CRUD buttons to the backend routes in this project that I am currently working on, I realized I needed to implement a simple flux architecture to manage global state. However, I haven’t used Redux in a while, and based on my experience, setting up reducers, and their various dispatch statements, was rather tedious, especially for a small project, so I decided to google what alternatives to Redux was there. ...

Working with Typescript feels like peeling open the inner wirings to expose the bare meat of each function/element. It’s more taxing on the brain, but gives your surgical clarity as to what exactly is going on. Interesting.

So I have 2 weeks of break before the new year, and one of the things that I plan to do is to explore some of the web3 protocols that I have been sleeping on. Lens ranks pretty high on my list. (And this is not just because I hate instagram, for an assortment of reasons.) So what exactly is Lens? For those of you who might not know, Lens is this pretty hype ‘web3’ social media platform that’s been trending in the last few months. ...

So recently I’ve stumbled upon this new NFT marketplace called Immutable X, which apparently features gas free minting and positions itself to be the future of web3 games. It piqued my interest, and being the brave web3 voyager that I am, I’ve decided to give it a try. (I’ve been exploring new tech in this space recently, partly to better my understanding of what is currently possible, and partly because I am curious about the state of Layer 2). ...

One quip I’ve heard made in a podcast recently is that if you’re just following the trends of SNP500, you’re not getting a complete picture of the market. The reason is because, Covid has produced particular market dynamics that have impacted different segments of the market differently. So in this post, let’s take a look at how different individual stocks within the SNP500 has performed, starting with the top 25 in terms of weight. ...

This crash was a long time coming. I mean, if you look at this chart, what do you see? Exactly. I see hyperinflated and unsustainable growth. S&P went from $800 in 2009 to the $4700 it was as of a month ago. That’s almost a 6x increase. For an index. The flash crash of March 2020 was…actually nothing. It was barely a correction - yes, it rebounded faster than it fell. In previous market crashes, the market takes around 2/3 years to recover to ATH. ...