Summary: Today I start my journey of building a Data Science company. My goal is to help people in the commodities trading industry, by applying Data Science principles to their problems. I will document the process along the way to organize my thoughts, and share my journey.
Day 1:
- I set up a new folder and virtual environment for my project. I will be using visual studio and python, since that is what I have the most experience with.
- I already had an email set up for this project that I will use. I am currently using multiple emails across this project, and it is something I need to clean up in the future.
- I finished the code that will grab the previous settle of corn and soybean futures. This is super basic, but I just wanted to get the basic functionality set up today. Overtime I will add more functionality.
- Finished function to send out an email with the corn and soybean prices. Again super simple, but the end goal is to have a daily automated email. I never set up an automated email before, but it only took a few minutes.
- Tested the program and it works! It is super basic, but I would say the MVP is finished on day one and I am super happy about that.
- I set up another test environment so that I can build and test things before putting them into production. This is a makeshift version control, but works for now.
To Do:
- Version Control. At some point I will need to add this project to GitHub. I want to approach this project with good software engineering practices, so version control is a must.
- Speaking of best SWE practices I want to get a plan for my documentation and organization. I have written software before (CS Undergrad) so I know how out of control these projects can get, and that causes wasted time and extra headaches. I want to move slow and steady with this one and do it the right way. Good notes and documentation will be vital. Other than github, I can look into whiteboarding apps and schedule/project list apps. I have used some free ones before (Asana?).
- Make a plan for what analytics I want to build.
- Research API data providers. Right now I am using yfinance, but I do not know if it will have everything that I need. So I want to research the best option before I get too deep.
- I want to get a basic, but useful analysis finished. I will start posting to X before worrying about collecting emails.