DEV Community: Lukas Garcia

How to Know if You Will Be a Successful Stock Trader

Lukas Garcia — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 20:51:33 +0000

Success in the stock market is a blend of skill, luck, and strategy. For aspiring traders, understanding the key indicators of potential success is crucial. This guide aims to highlight the signs that you might be on the path to becoming a successful stock trader.

Understanding the Market

Before diving into trading, it's essential to have a thorough understanding of how the stock market works. This includes knowledge of financial instruments, market trends, and the impact of global events on stock prices.

Analytical Skills

A successful trader often has strong analytical skills. This includes the ability to read and interpret stock charts, understand financial reports, and make decisions based on data analysis.

Risk Management

Risk management is crucial in trading. Knowing how much risk you can afford to take and setting stop-loss orders to minimize potential losses are vital skills for a trader.

Emotional Discipline

The ability to remain disciplined and emotionally detached is vital. Market fluctuations can be stressful, and successful traders know how to keep their emotions in check.

Practice and Patience

Practice makes perfect. Start with a demo account to understand the market without risking real money. Be patient as gaining proficiency in trading takes time.

Backtracking Your Predictions

One effective way to gauge your skill in predicting market trends is by backtracking your stock price predictions. Go 500 days in the past and compare the market conditions then with your current predictions. You can easily find out what the date was 500 days ago by visiting this handy date calculator.

Continuous Learning

The stock market is ever-evolving. Successful traders continuously educate themselves about new strategies, market changes, and financial instruments.

Conclusion

Becoming a successful stock trader requires time, effort, and a willingness to learn. By understanding the market, honing analytical skills, managing risks effectively, and maintaining emotional discipline, you can increase your chances of success in the trading world.

ICU formatted messages (strings)

Lukas Garcia — Sat, 11 Sep 2021 23:27:17 +0000

When dealing with strings we often experience challenges to insert some placeholders or to completely replace the string content depending on some variables.

One of the best solutions I have found for this is using ICU message format. It allows us to define:

placeholders, in a common way {name}
plural, with {count, plural, one{1 apple} other{{count} apples}}
custom selects, with {gender, select, male{His} female{Her} other{Their}}

Plurals are especially important, those can not be easily defined programmatically with if conditions since plural rules differ among languages. Using ICU message plurals allow us to define only those plural variations that are applicable for the given language, and the framework/package automatically applies those variations depending on the variable (count in our case).

Luckily, ICU messages are supported in some popular frameworks or packages:

And I see more packages is starting to support it.
Although ICU formats can vary a bit among those implementations, the foundation is the same.

The only disadvantage that I have found with ICU messages is that sometimes it can be a bit hard to spot errors in its structure. For instance, missing second closing curly bracket for plural, missing comma, or similar. Using online editor for ICU message format can detect such issues, or make it pretty printed for easier editing.
However, I couldn't find a better way to define those plural and select cases that are easier to maintain than with this structure.

I believe many of you are aware of ICU messages, but I still see some developers use if conditions in the code for plurals which does not work, concatenate a string that contains variables, or similar. ICU messages make it much easier.

How to use Basic authentication with curl?

Lukas Garcia — Sat, 06 Feb 2021 22:53:25 +0000

About Basic Auth

In Basic Authentication, a HTTP request contains a header Authorization: Basic <credentials>, where credentials is the Base64 encoding of username and password joined by a single colon :.

Basic Auth is considered as not safe enough, but we still use it a lot for some less sensitive stuff because it is easy to set up.

Basic Auth with curl

You can use Basic Http Auth with curl in following two ways:

Option 1: Pass credentials to curl

Passing Basic credentials to curl command is easy as this:

curl -u username:password https://example.com

If your username or password contains a special character, such as white-space, then you might want to surround credentials with single quotes:

curl -u 'username:password' https://example.com

Option 2: Pass Authorization header

If you want to have a full control over your HTTP request, you might want to Base64 encode your username:password and place it into Authorization header.
Curl command should look like this:

curl -H 'Authorization: Basic dXNlcm5hbWU6cGFzc3dvcmQ=' https://example.com

Basic Auth and colon in username

Colon : is not allowed to be used in an username according to Basic Auth specification. But in case you need to support it (ie your users are allowed to create such username) and you are in charge of client and server, you might want to URL encode the username and password on both sides.

Free everyday tools for a software engineer

Lukas Garcia — Sat, 31 Oct 2020 14:21:26 +0000

As software engineers we want to be sure we use our time in a productive way. Our software industry changes on weekly bases, and it is good to step back every now and then and check if we use the best possible tools available.

Of course, we can use many project/technology dependent tools, but here I will share a few tools I use on daily bases, no matter what kind of work I do as an engineer at that moment.

Visual Studio Code Some would say it is an IDE mainly intended for web development, but I use it as a default text editor.
SourceTree Still the best Git client imho.
Trello I use this free "tasks list" tool for my personal tasks on the work, and also for shared team tasks on the projects if no demand for advanced tools like Jira.
Awesome screenshot Chrome extension tool that helps me easily share my screenshots with custom marks in case of bug reports or similar.
Postman Handy tool to save and execute HTTP requests. If endpoints require dynamic/custom authorization, I configure them with "Pre-request Script".
DevPal Handy tool for quick conversions & similar operations such as Base64 & URL encoding/decoding, hashing, random UUID.
Docker Many reasons to use docker. For instance having the same setup as in production environment, not polluting your OS with new installations you plan to use, etc.
Diagrams Whenever working on a complex thing, multi-disciplinary task, or on processes, I like to visually depict it with this tool and share it with my team to be in sync.