Ask HN: Advice for running a trading side project

2 points by yeahman 4 years ago | 1 comment

Hi,

We are 3 people (2 developers + 1 trader) who are making trading tools intended to trade our own capital.

So far we have a desktop application which is a UI for the trader to interact with. And a modular monolith for the backend with MongoDb as a database. We also have a number of jobs that need to be run on the regular (mostly to keep required data up to date in mongo). All the source is in C#.

We only have a local environment. We want to expand to have a development and a production environment. What is the best way to do this?

We have some CI, but how do we do CD? Where should we run the backend? How do we deploy the UI to the traders desktop?

We want to keep the costs low and we got burned by an unexpected bill when trying to run this on Azure (which Microsoft luckily waived). We considered having a script which the trader runs which will essentially do a git pull and then run the build and run scripts. But that way we lose control over the backend.

Any suggestions welcome,

Thanks

accountofme 4 years ago |

Hi,

I've been down this road, so yeah, good luck!

My advice is keep it simple.

Following trends and doing a lot of other things is going to get you side tracked (this happened to me).

1. For dev and prod systems -> for dev its simple buy a desktop based system and go to town ryzen + 64gb ram + ssds will get you far. For prod fixed price monthly VM that can handle your needs.

2. Deployment to trader -> zip file extract to a new directory and run it

3. Ci and CD are great but your best bet is to write some scripts that are well tested and documented to deploy yourstuff and do it when you think your release is well tested.

4. There was a hft fund that lost 450 million in 45mins due to deployment error and testing errors. Test test test. Make sure your software is bullet proof!!!!

Hope that helps