Know Your Domain
11/15/23

Developing software is a pleasure most of the time. Especially when it goes smoothly. One of the bumps that disrupt that smoothness is lack of domain knowlege. Today, I felt that bumb.

Ive been working on an app that sends messages to a telegram account that will be read outloud. This app is for a blind stock trader who due to his disability cannot use normal trading terminals. The excitement of working on such an interesting app had me on a high for a few days.

That pink cloud was popped on the day I schedule to deliver that app. That morning, I woke confident that I could put the finishing touches on the app. "I got about 8 hours till this meeting, Im good." I laid in bed a bit, did some chores, ate a breakfast, and finally around 3 with hopped in front of my computer and started coding. I went over to polygon.io, created an account, got an api key, and started pulling market data. Smooth.

I noticed the final data point was the end of the prior day. "Oh snap.. maybe theres a limitation on the api." I was right. Some market api's only allow you to pull data live if you have paid account. Polygon is one of them. I spent an hour doing research on market data apis to see if I can find an api that gave free live data.

Eventually I found one but there was a problem... all the data ended at 3:59. By this time it was about 4:30. The time of delivery. I got on a call with the trader, apologized for being late, reassured I'd have it done by the end of the day, then got off the call and went back to work.

I tried so many apis... all of the ended at 3:59 or had some other limitation. My faith started to break down. I wondered seriously if I was called to be a software engineer at all. Maybe Im living a lie. This man is going to trash me on Upwork and Ill never get another client.

As a last effort, I opend TradingView to check if I could put together some hacky solution, but when I openned the app, I saw tradingview's market data also ended at 3:59.

Then it dawned on me. "Wait... what time do markets close?"

They close at 4:00pm... duh

Know your domain.

-Amon