Matt Abar

We Want Your Data

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

It's time to write our interfaces. I'm not sure any aspect of writing portfolio management software is "fun" in the traditional sense. But if I had to make a list of the software pieces I was looking forward to, custodial interfaces would end up close to the bottom.

But as the walrus said, the time has come. We need to import custodial data and there's still no generic data transfer spec for the industry. So for the third time in my life, I have to write interfaces to the same companies. Again.

Evolution of the Developer Preview

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:04:00 GMT

As I've mentioned before, I see one of FinFolio's competitive advantages being the open architecture and plugin nature of our technology. We're making it easy for someone to extend our software and customize it for a particular firm. You'll be able to add fields, create new reports in Crystal, and add custom screens, interfaces and data alerts. We did two Developer Preview releases before the alpha that had some of this functionality available at the object level.

Alpha 1a

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 01:16:00 GMT

I just posted Alpha 1a to the site. We spent the last two weeks cleaning up the existing screens, redesigning the import and print wizard, and stabilizing the software by fixing numerous crashing bugs. We've added all the icons, generally cleaned everything up and it's looking sharp. We're really seeing the payoff now on the new (and sometimes painful) technology decisions we've made.

Alpha Update and Hiring

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:13:00 GMT

It feels great getting the alpha out. I've been demoing it to the beta group and getting very good feedback. The general impression seems to be that we're "on the right track." We're planning on doing another release next week to fix some of the worst system-crashing bugs. We've also done a lot of work on the screens.

On to other items--FinFolio is hiring again! This time for a WPF/C# developer.

FinFolio Alpha Release

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:42:00 GMT

We posted the FinFolio Alpha on the site yesterday. It's the desktop version only, with a few working screens, a couple reports, and one working interface. For now, it only works in client/server mode so don't try to run it over the wire. It's really rough--even for an alpha. There are too many known issues to list, so I won't try. Expect it to crash a lot and you won't be disappointed. ;-)

Uninterrupted Work Flow

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 19:09:00 GMT

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'm writing this from Las Vegas, we flew in last night and are visiting my wife's family for the weekend. The last couple days at work were fun; the software has gelled and we can finally play around with it, moving from screen to screen, simulating actual advisor work flows. In my own experience, and in the couple demos I did yesterday, the coolest feature seems to be the Process Manager, which runs things like reports and imports in the background. It's an obvious next step for PMS technology, and I hadn't realized how well it would demo. It scored the highest on the important "Oohs and Ahhs" scale.

Speed Benchmarks

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:05:00 GMT

We've been tracking the speed of various "bottleneck" processes throughout FinFolio's development. I run them from time to time, to make sure there aren't any surprises waiting for us. We're up to 13 different tests. Each test runs an isolated feature multiple times and reports the average time per run. The Per # (ms) column is the average amount of time it takes to run the test, and the # Per Second column is the number of tests that can run per second.

These results are on my development box, which has two 4-core processors, 8GB RAM, and Vista-64. However, the tests are single threaded, so when I run them on a single processor machine with 2GB of RAM, they're only marginally slower.

Timeline Update

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:24:00 GMT

We're about ten months into the software development and things are going well. Certain technologies took longer to master but we're past all of the big hurdles. The end result is looking great and we've been getting positive feedback about the reports and screens on the beta forums for several months now.

Developer Preview #2 Available

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:27:00 GMT

We just posted the second developer preview; this will be our last release without screens. The big new feature is the report engine, but we’ve added or changed numerous other items. We also included source code for a few of the modules, as well as partial API documentation for the entire framework.

If you're in the Beta group, you can download the release here. If you aren't in the Beta group but would like to be, contact me. As with the first developer preview, don't download this unless you are an intermediate to advanced Microsoft dot Net developer.

Milestone Hit - Imports

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:52:00 GMT

The import framework is complete and we're ready to start adding custodians. In this post I discuss some of the speed challenges we overcame, and list the import features.