fecon236 docs :: Introduction

History

The fecon series of computational tools for financial economics began around 2014 at U.C. Berkeley when Jupyter notebooks were known as IPython notebooks (file extension .ipynb is an artifact of that era). BIDS, Berkeley Institute for Data Science, was just getting established. The joint seminars by the Economics Department and the Haas School of Business, run under the designation 235, needed tools to replicate their findings with publicly accessible data and code.

The Python scientific ecosystem was complicated and the documentation was murky, constantly in flux, at that time. Also there was a transitional barrier between python2 and python3. To address these needs, fecon235 developed, starting with datasets obtained through the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank.

Critique of fecon235 source code

Development occurred bottom-up through experiments replicable in notebooks. The open source repository at http://git.io/fecon235 housed illustrative notebooks, designed to serve as HOWTO examples, and the application code was abstracted from such experimentation. In retrospect, we see that:

Birth of fecon236

In 2018 we address the critique by designing fecon236 top-down so that the structure of the code is refined, providing a solid foundation for future development. It shall consist only of refactored application code and its tests, excluding the notebooks.

The new architecture allows us:

Please see https://git.io/fecon236 for more details.

Versioning differences

Application code will be henceforth developed in feconNNN projects where NNN is even-numbered. Notebooks shall continue to be developed in feconNNN projects where NNN is odd-numbered.

In fecon235, versioning is date-based: vX.YY.MMDD

Versioning for fecon236, however, will use the traditional MAJOR.MINOR.MICRO format conforming to PyPI standards. The alpha "a" or beta "b" tag may be accompanied by a Travis build number. Release candidates will be denoted by "c" (not rc). We may occasionally use .post handles which are date-based, for example: 10.6.7b70.postYYMMDD

Security

The versions will correspond to git tags which annotated and cryptograhically signed for security (verified by GitHub). The issue of trust for notebooks is discussed in our docs: https://git.io/trustnb

References


Last update : 2018-06-22