Personal projects

Throughout my years I've started a few larger scale projects. Some of these and their progress are described below. I also often think about smaller questions and project ideas. A few are documented in my blog posts.

I've decided to create a personal website after reading a paper by Emily Moravec summarizing different choices one can make along the way. If you want to have a read of the paper yourself, you can download it from arXiv here or access the published version here. Below I will describe my way to building this website and some choices I made along the way.

The last time I had done any "web-development" was more than 10 years ago for a small school project. Back then we used HTML4 if I remember correctly and I re-did the entire site the night before we had to hand it in. You may be able to imagine how much of that knowledge was still with me. On top of the knowledge lost to the never-stopping passage of time we had never talked about web-hosting and I'm not sure to which degree we had worked with CSS back then. Therefore, the initial learning curve was rather steep. And I'm by no means a professional by now. So if you find any problems on this website, please get in touch and let me know. You can find my contact information here.

My first choice was considering where I wanted to host the website, as that would directly impact the way I would actually build it. I did not want to spend a lot of money on this website, as this felt more like an experiment and also because the traffic would most certainly be low. Following Figure 2 of the paper mentioned above and avoiding to use my institute as a host, I chose to use github-pages. I wanted to avoid using my institute simply for the reason that I will most probably shift employers after completing my PhD. If the website was hosted by the institute, I would have to remember to copy it over to a new host then. Using an external host removes this source of error.

Choosing github-pages as a hosting service also meant that I would have to use Jekyll to build the website. Jekyll is an automated tool to build static websites, i.e. websites which are not rendered on the server on request. It simplifies the process by allowing the user to specify templates that govern the overall look of the website. The templates may then be adjusted to create a personalized look. It also allows to make use of a few automated tools to loop over files and build the website from its contents. This means for instance that building a menu is relatively simple.

After having chosen Jekyll to build the website it would in theory have been as simple as choosing a template (like Minimal mistakes) and filling it with content. However, I had no (real) experience with web development. And I saw this website as an opportunity to change that. So instead of using a ready-to-use template, I decided to build this website from the ground up. Not because it is efficient (I think I could have created this website in 10 hours instead of 50-60) but because I see it as a learning experience. Looking back at it now I can already see many places where it is inefficiently coded and where it is actually hard to understand what happens. But I'm proud of having gotten it into a function state.

PyTrest is a Python package that I created to test stock market trading strategies and build a virtual depot to do paper trading in. When I started getting into the stock market I wanted to utilize my data analysis background and see if I was able to play the game of statistics to come up with some efficient trading strategies. My main problem was that most off-the-shelf libraries did not consider comission costs and taxes, which are a major factor (at least with small capital). Also, for some of these libraries the syntax seemed so obscure that it was difficult to impossible to get the raw data into the library. To resolve these issues I decided to write my own library. I also wanted to use this experience to learn about library design and package architecture. If you want to have a look at the source code you can find it on my github page here.