My name is Diogo and I joined OpenBB about a year ago. So far it has been an exciting learning journey and it feels good to look back and see what the team has accomplished in such a short period of time.
My background
The image below briefly describes my academic background. I studied Management and Finance. After college I worked in the banking industry in Portugal, mostly as a Fixed Income analyst. At some point, I was spending some time learning math topics as a hobby so to pursue this interest while staying close to finance, I decided to start a master degree on Mathematical Finance. Some time after this, I felt that it would be interesting to learn about a more tech related subject and change career, so I started a BSc degree in Computer Science. The truth is that I enjoyed studying Management and Finance, but computers was something that I was always truly interested and got behind along the way.
Joining OpenBB
I was working during the day and attending CS classes in the evening. It was sometime during my day that I got a message on LinkedIn by Minh Hoang, a Product Manager at OpenBB.
What started as a brainstorm with her and Jeroen Bouma (also PM at OpenBB) ended up with a discussion and some beers with Didier, submitting a pull-request, meeting James and later on being given the opportunity to join the team.
Experience so far
I’ve been hooked to OpenBB since I started. I feel deeply aligned with the idea of empowering the growing community that lives in the intersection between Technology and Finance. This community was being underserved by the available tools and OpenBB can help fix that. Experience so far makes me believe that the fastest and most enduring way to build for this audience is indeed open-source. This way we can easily receive feedback from our users and allow them to build the product with us. Looking inside, my experience with the team keeps me motivated to contribute for the project everyday. What I value the most on this front has been the pace and freedom that is present on the day-to-day. It is common to see ideas being openly discussed and implemented very fast.
A personal example I have on this front is how a small Slack discussion about Excel importance in the finance industry sparked the idea of creating an OpenBB Excel add-in. In about a week there was a proof-of-concept ready, the team was very receptive and this is now part of our backlog for future development. Read more about this here.
I hope this post helps sheds some light around the company’s culture and I must say I’m excited to see what this project will become in the future.