Inspiration
The API provided by Bloomberg provides data to the user in JSON form. This format may be easy to use for computer scientists and data scientists. However, for most people who don't have a science or engineering background, they won't know how to use the API. Thus, we provided a web application for people to use. They just need to enter what category of data they want to use will immediately get the data in csv format.
How it works
Website for our application: https://uclahilahack.herokuapp.com (for now, our design is best supported by Safari and mobile)
If you want to run it locally, simply download the code and run python app.py. Then type localhost:5000 in a browser to use our web application. You need to have Flask installed.
To grab stock data, you can select multiple securities and fields. Then provide a start and end date, and select a periodicity. For each security selected, we generate a button that you can click on to get the data in a csv.
Challenges I ran into
Choosing the right framework and setting up the environment took some time. We wanted to choose something that was fast enough to set up in the time-frame of the Hackathon, so the Flask framework, used with Bootstrap and Heroku, was the perfect choice. We also took some time brainstorming how to convert the data from Bloomberg into csv format and how to bring the data to the user.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We had no experience using the Python Flask framework before. But we were able to create our first application in 36 hours!
What I learned
We learned that the amount of data from Bloomberg was much more vast that we initially assumed. We talked about our idea with the people from Bloomberg and decided to focus on a couple of commonly-used fields for stock companies. In our application, we used only about 20 companies for demonstration purposes.
What's next for Get Data From Bloomberg
For now it can only access to Stock data with limited companies and field options. We wish to add more query and field options, as well as access to a more comprehensive selection of companies. We would also like to construct a more visually-appealing and user-friendly front-end; specifically, adding form validation will help reduce bugs in the backend.
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