During my university years I learned about open source, and for me it was amazing that I could work on a project and others could see that code and build on top of it. I thought that if the world was open source, everything would be so much better! More transparency, higher quality, greater reproducibility, lower costs, rapid innovation, faster go-to-market, new ideas, community efforts ...
As Joseph Jack says "Open Source Is Eating Software FASTER than Software Is Eating The World". For more blogposts regarding benefits of open source check COSS Fundamentals: Essential Reads.
Source: OSS Capital
At the start of my open source journey I was almost "ashamed" to push my code out there. What if my code wasn't good enough? What if I did some silly mistake that prevented me from finding a job in the future? So I used to develop in private and after carefully making sure that all the code was working I would change the repository to public.
Over the years I've learned that people don't really care, and that you gain much more from building in public than waiting for the "perfect" code (spoiler alert: that will never happen).
Nowadays I'm a massive open source advocate. I work primarily on developing/contributing to open source projects that help me solve a real problem.
OpenBB Terminal is what it is today because of open source. The first truly open source investment research platform. People don't realize this but after I worked on it for 2 months on my own, I made it live with only stocks data access and a very limited amount of features.
Nowadays the terminal has access to options, crypto, forex, ETFs, mutual funds, nfts, macro economy and even alternative data. In addition, it has built-in toolboxes that allow our users to perform econometrics, portfolio attribution, portfolio optimization, create dashboards, run automated reports and even forecast asset prices based on the latest Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models.
Open source not only enabled people from all over the globe to work on the same project with the same goal: to democratize investment research, but helped us connect in ways that I didn't know that were possible. If:
- The mission to democratize investment research for everyone resonates with you
- You know python or want to learn
- You want to become a quant or have finance interest
Then, consider joining us at OpenBB Terminal in the spirit of Hacktoberfest.
I have started hacking, what are you waiting for? There are a lot of opportunities, some of which:
- Add a full new menu. E.g. futures, fixed income, bonds. (big task)
- Add new commands (mid task)
- Add new data sources to existing commands (small task)
- Translate terminal in other language (easy but time consuming)
- And many more!
If you have any question, join our Discord and participate in our bi-weekly community calls happening on Fridays at 6:30pm CET / 12:30 ET / 9:30 PT.
Otherwise, let's chat on our Github project.