I joined Robinhood in 2018. In 2020, I began to actively trade. Having had strong returns, I decided to share here some of the lessons I learnt along the way so other small retail investors like me may also benefit.

Disclosure: This article is not investment, tax, or legal advice, nor is it a solicitation for investment. I may have an affiliate relationship with some of the companies listed below. Furthermore, I am not a financial expert and offer this only as a way to share my experiences.

Introduction

I spent the first 2 years after opening my Robinhood account dabbling semi-passively in trading to gain an intuition for how the markets moved. After this learning period, I decided to take on a more aggressive investment stance. …

As a society, we laud the work of generalists but our processes simply are not meant to recognize them.

What is a Generalist?

Engineering and our educational systems as a whole are designed towards specialization.

At elementary school everyone learns the basics on which further knowledge will be built. In middle school, the division of knowledge into subjects starts to appear. As students are allocated individual time blocks to learn math, sciences, social studies and others. Up to this point, despite the already visible division of subjects, all students are still expected to learn the same subjects and to the same level of depth.

In high school, specialization starts to take place. Teenagers with only a superficial knowledge of different subjects are expected to choose the ones they want to further specialize in. …

For when .includes is not enough.

Basic Rails Associations

Rails’ ActiveRecord associations permits relating one model to another. Take the example below:

class Post < ApplicationRecord
  has_many :comments
endclass Comment < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :post
end

A Post has many Comments. This allows us to call Post.first.comments to get all the comments associated with a post! ActiveRecord internally generates our required SQL queries:

SELECT "posts".* FROM "posts" WHERE "posts".id = 1
SELECT "comments".* FROM "comments" WHERE "comments".post_id

N+1 Queries and .includes

However, imagine we are serializing this data to return as part of a controller for the /posts index. In that case, instead of getting the comments for just one post, we would get it for multiple posts: Post.all.each { |p| puts p.comments }. …

The same curiosity that drove us to spread across our planet now drives us to reach out towards the stars.

These 6 incredible missions are teaching us more about our neighboring planets and sun while pushing our engineering capabilities to the limit.

1. Chang’e 4 — Lunar Lander and Rover

Objectives

The Chang’e 4 lander and rover are part of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program which aims to develop the required technologies in preparation for crewed missions to the moon in the 2030's.

Mission Updates

The current lander and rover are part of phase 2 of the program and demonstrated the ability to successfully land and navigate on the lunar surface.

Landing took place on January 3rd 2019 in the Von Kármán crater being the first to make a soft landing on the far side of the moon. …

A simple setup to programmatically enqueue jobs in a SLURM cluster.

Introduction

For those that have worked with a super computer cluster before, you know that scheduling batches of jobs where each job may not only have different settings (Ex: Hyper-parameters) but also different code can be a cumbersome task. Moreover, keeping track of all the different versions of code when analyzing the results can be tricky and a simple note taking error can result in many hours rerunning jobs.

Here, I demonstrate how to setup a Github Actions based approach to deploying jobs to a supercomputing cluster managed by SLURM. …

I finally got around to implementing my first Forex trading robot!

Introduction

For years, I have fantasized about building a Forex trading robot that would slowly and consistently increase its account balance. However, I was never really sure where to start. What company to use? How do I access the APIs? Is it safe?

Recently, I blocked off some time to learn what would be needed to develop such a system and it culminated in a very simple to implement python script. In the remainder of this article, I will detail how it works.

Disclosure: This article is not investment, tax, or legal advice, nor is it a solicitation for investment. Furthermore, I am not a financial expert and offer this only as a way to share my experiences. …

Let’s face it, working at a startup is inherently different than working at a large company. However, what exactly is different and how can you work to increase the chances of your startup succeeding?

Introduction

We often hear the tales of the great entrepreneurs that with minimal resources managed to displace a behemoth incumbent with nothing but a clever idea. However, what is often unheard is the years of hard (and effective) work put in by the founding team to make their story a reality.

In the next section, we will go over key points that can often differentiate a great startup engineer. …

Quickly start sending Slack messages from your Ruby on Rails backend without the need for any third party libraries!

Introduction

Slack provides several ways to integrate with the platform. Among these integration options are the Slack Workflows. In this article, we will go over setting up one of these workflows and use it to provide a Ruby on Rails backend a way to post messages to Slack.

Methods

Setup the Workflow in Slack

1. From the Slack Desktop client click on your workspace name, select tools and then “Workflow Builder”.
2. Click “Create” on the top right corner.
3. Type a name for your workflow such as: “My First Workflow”. This name will appear as the title of messages created by the workflow. …