
Ask HN: Useful web tools to build expressly to demo programming abilities? - votr
I&#x27;m a programmer in finance looking to transition to web apps. I&#x27;d like to build a few web-based tools which I would make free and open-source. I&#x27;ve come up with a list of things including stock screeners and retirement savings calculators.<p>Is there anything I can build that you&#x27;d find useful or that you would recommend as a good portfolio piece?
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skram
A web tool that took a CSV or JSON endpoint and ran a few R/Python/whatever
scripts to see what the mean/mode/min/max of each column was, if there were
any strong linear (or other types) of correlations, etc.

A lot of example datasets can be found on opendata.socrata.com, data.gov,
data.atf.gov, data.cityofchicago.org, and more.

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gremlinsinc
A mobile/web app maybe meteor stack w/ cordova if you wanted to go cross-
platform. I'd build a calculator to end all calculators -- normal basic
calculator, but have tabs for other types of calculators like Mortgage,
Retirement Savings, etc... Basically take every type of financial calculator
and bottle it up into a single app.

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elcritch
I'm working on a graphics/plotting DSL embedded in HTML5 web-components partly
inspired by the ability to do customizable financial graphs. If you're
interested in collaborating on a few financial graphs in HTML5/SVG/D3, PM me.
I'm also transitioning to freelancing and creating a startup and would like to
open source some more code (especially good demos).

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gkop
I'd like a Slackbot who I can ask to submit the most recent posted link in the
channel to HN.

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votr
I've never used Slack but I looked up what Slackbots are. In short, I would
create this bot, package it as a slack app ([https://api.slack.com/slack-
apps](https://api.slack.com/slack-apps)), and implement the slack button
([https://api.slack.com/docs/slack-button](https://api.slack.com/docs/slack-
button)) for your installation, correct?

