TradeTester

Background

After I graduated from OSU in 2019, I had a few months before I could start, so I decided to build something bigger than anything I had done in the past. My main goal was to utilize my experience with firebase to develop something cross-platform between mobile and web. ALthough I was working with a lot of familiar technologies, I still wanted to learn something new in the process, so I decided to learn a new web framework. I also wanted to work with a variety of different APIs to make the app seem as realistic as possible.

I drew a lot of inspiration from Robinhood when I was designing the UX for this application. I loved the clean, modern style as well as the after-hours dark mode feature (which I even incorporated into TradeTester for web). Partway through the development process, I decided to pivot the focus towards education by adding a teachers dashboard.

Challenges

Learning Python and Django

There is always a technical barrier to overcome when learning a new language. There is an even bigger barrier when learning a new web framework in the process. It took me a while to get used to the framework, but fortunately there are a lot of great online resources for learning Django. I used a video series on YouTube, which can be found Here .

Database Cross Compatibility

By utilizing Firebase's web and mobile compatibility, I was able to make the mobile and web applications completely compatible so users can log onto both platforms with the same account. Of course, this was no easy task. I used a Firebase wrapper called Pyrebase to make it easier to use Pyrebase on the web side.

Leveraging APIs

I utilized several APIs in order to acquire the realtime data that runs TradeTester. In order to acquire all of the data that is available to the user, I had to asynchronously pull from several different APIs in order to provide the comprehensive market data that makes TradeTester practical. I had to setup these API calls on both the Android and Django apps.