Going to Consult a Programmer - Advice Appreciated

[darthtrader2.0 10]

You should not forget maintenance of the application which is very important. If you're super talented student gets his master and expects to be paid as much as a professional or isn't interested in your program anymore, you can probably throw away all the code, because it's unmaintainable (once he is knows what he's doing he'll probably even tell you that and he'll want to rewrite it from scratch).

 

No offense AgeKay, but you are totally biased since your a real programmer and have your own self interest in this debate.(self interest is not a bad thing to me so please don't take it that way)

To me its like if you hired a team of programmers to make you the most baddass software on an apple 2e in 1984..no matter who you hired that code was virtually worthless not enough years later to justify the expense. Probly a better example that if you had hired the guys that brought neoticker to market for your own custom software, at this point its such a mess it may as well be scrapped, save the concepts/IP and pay someone on the cheap to re code those ideas in C#.

Basically, this business moves so fast robust software simply does not make economic sense vs a hack. You have almost virtual certainty that your robust software will be clunky 5 years from now.

The hard part of any automated system at this level is the logic of the system itself, the software engineering aspect is somewhat nill. Maybe I'm biased because I would be interested to see how a computer science student on the cheap implimented my logic from my lack of experience in software engineering but even if they went out of the way to make the code unreadible, its still my logic that they are expressing.

I forget at what point I heard about the concept of "fast, cheap and dirty" as far as software engineering goes(or something like that). I think it was some AI nonsense during the dotcom bubble...That concept certainly doesn't apply to AI but to engineering trading software ideas, that seem to me to be right on the money.

[zdo 20]

...I forget at what point I heard about the concept of "fast, cheap and dirty" as far as software engineering goes(or something like that)...

 

Wasn't it something like

'good, fast, cheap - pick two. You can't have all three" ?

[AgeKay 10]

Wasn't it something like

'good, fast, cheap - pick two. You can't have all three" ?

 

You're right. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_triangle

 

No offense AgeKay, but you are totally biased since your a real programmer and have your own self interest in this debate.

 

btw, i said right off the bat that i don't take any projects right now so i have really no self interest in this debate. I just want to give some qualified advice to brownsfan since I like his posts about trading and i would like him to save him all the trouble.

[brownsfan019 17]

The feedback has been great from my point of view, so I do appreciate all of it.

 

As of now I've put this on the backburner as I examine more closely the possibility of focusing on a small number of trades, but larger size. If I go 100% this route (and pretty much there now) I really don't need to pay someone to program it. Reason being that I am looking at a work day of about 7am - 11am (at the latest) and seems silly to pour money into something that I think will be hard to program and with limited use.

 

Now if I program it and package to sell for the bargain price of $10,000 or so, then maybe.

 

:rofl:

[zdo 20]

Now if I program it and package to sell for the bargain price of $10,000 or so, then maybe. :rofl:

 

Yep, any and all trading systems are profitable - if you sell enough copies...

[darthtrader2.0 10]

Wasn't it something like

'good, fast, cheap - pick two. You can't have all three" ?

 

I still don't think thats what I'm talking about. I can't believe that "good" would be part of that since its so illogical to fit in there, one has to take bias though that this was during the dot com era .

I was refering to an idea that you just throw as many ideas at AI as possible and hopefully because of the number of samples something "good" emerges.

Total tangent, nothing to do with trading software if you want to nit pick because your self interest sits in software engineering and robust applications....:þ

[JBWTrader 10]

Hi Brownsfan,

 

A couple of other things to consider IMHO mate.

 

I noticed you are on the phone with your programmer. If possible at the start or shortly into the project meeting face to face will give you both a much stronger synch together of what you require. I personally have found the phone/distance stuff difficult to manage.

 

Soemone else mention very importantly leave no ambiguity in what you want. A lot of users (including myself !!) have not been as clear on the idea(s) as they should be right from the start....makes it very difficult for the Programmer. Adds cost on in the end.

 

Just my 2 cents worth. Good luck on your project I hope you get what you are looking for.

 

All the Best

 

John

[zdo 20]

darth ?And who's nitpicking? It really doesn't seem like 'self interest' has all that much fired up precedence when a programmer like AgeKay posting is actually 'outing' the inefficacies of hiring off the shelf programmers for trading applications.

 

btw, wouldn't 'good' apply to AI too? "...just throw as many ideas at ( a lousy inappropriate, not 'good' (but still probably expensive)) AI as possible" or don't do a 'good' job with the data transforms and you can train it until the wheels come off and it will never produce consistently. AI is still just a fancy word for optimization ... on hidden, unseen parameters yes but it's still just optimization at this point... and there is such thing as 'bad' optimization...

[sirkin01 10]

i'm looking for a programmer i see your talking about one. whats the cost. Can i get any recomendations from anyone. and numbers, websites, etc. thank you