By Matt Abar on
6/25/2008 12:30 PM
It has been our busiest month yet, as evidenced by the lack of blog posts. We've been preparing the code drop for our Developer Release, which involves tying together all the different modules we've been working on. While the rest of the team toils, I'm going to talk about one of the bigger issues we've been dealing with over the past few months--data persistence, which is developer-speak for "saving information in the database".
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By Matt Abar on
5/23/2008 9:35 AM
We finally locked down the cost module last week--our biggest headache so far. As you enter transactions, whether via import or data entry, FinFolio allocates your tax lots using your specified allocation.
It does LIFO, FIFO, Highest, Lowest, Average, and Specific Lot. A neat thing about Specific Lot--you set the top-level allocation type to Specific Lot, then you can set the lot type on individual transactions to LIFO/FIFO/Highest/Lowest. This means you can do fine-grained lot allocation without the headache of having to calculate the lots yourself. And you can still allocate them manually if you'd like.
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By Matt Abar on
4/15/2008 10:43 AM
I hesitate to even call this a milestone. We needed something simple to flesh out how the Calculation structure works. And Mike and I have written rates of return so often we could almost do it in our sleep. It took about a week, with much of it being spent perusing my library of rate of return books, looking for new formula tricks (there weren't any).
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By Matt Abar on
4/9/2008 5:15 PM
We've been waiting for the development framework to be completed before adding staff. It's getting close and should be solid enough by May or June. So we're starting our search for two Denver-based positions. All of the positions come with stock, salary based on experience, and all the fun and excitement of working with a cutting-edge, fully funded startup company.
- Director - Professional Services
- Senior Developer - Microsoft C# .NET
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By Matt Abar on
4/2/2008 2:42 PM
Our strategy for feature implementation is to take the hardest features, and those most likely to change our database/object structure, and implement those first. We recently discovered that the Portfolio/Account views were going to be difficult to implement, so we put cost accounting on hold. This is a long post because the concept is very tricky and positively impacts many areas of the software.
There are two separate "views" of the data in FinFolio, one to represent the legal system-of-record data (Account view) and one to mirror the firm's view of the client positions (Portfolio view). This lets us maintain the integrity of the system-of-record data and preserve the layout for data imports, while allowing advisors to specify a completely different reporting structure that can be used for modeling and printing client reports.
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By Matt Abar on
3/27/2008 12:42 PM
We are moving our office tomorrow. Our new address will be:
11592 Bell Cross Circle
Parker, CO 80138
No big deal, just another temporary office. We won't be someplace permanent until year-end when we break out of development mode.
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By Matt Abar on
3/12/2008 1:22 PM
The Financial Advisor Magazine article that was written about FinFolio implied that we have a $500M minimum AUM (assets under management) requirement. That's not true, and I explained it poorly to Andy, which is how it got into the article.
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By Matt Abar on
3/5/2008 1:33 PM
If you've been reading the blog, you know that our plan is to build our user interface in Silverlight 2.0. I haven't talked much about it, because it represents a big risk. Numerous things have to fall into place before we can commit to doing a significant portion of our development in an unreleased Microsoft product.
Our requirements:
- We need a solid Silverlight 2.0 beta by May.
- It needs to deliver a truly next-gen UI experience.
- We need some good reference apps to use as a starting point for our UI design.
- We need third party component developers to be writing Silverlight plugins.
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By Matt Abar on
2/28/2008 11:54 AM
We just hit our first two milestones. Two major pieces of the framework are complete, our data persistence layer, and the plugin structure. We finished them a week ago but I wanted to be sure before posting it on the blog.
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By Matt Abar on
2/15/2008 2:10 PM
I just launched the FinFolio forums. These are for beta testers and people in our advisory group to exchange ideas and help to shape our software development. If you are interested in being a beta tester and gaining access to the forums, please contact me here.
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