Python for Finance

Chapter 2. Infrastructure and Tools

Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.

— Rem Koolhaas

You could say infrastructure is not everything, but without infrastructure everything can be nothing—be it in the real world or in technology. What do we mean then by infrastructure? In principle, it is those hardware and software components that allow the development and execution of a simple Python script or more complex Python applications.

However, this chapter does not go into detail with regard to hardware infrastructure, since all Python code and examples should be executable on almost any hardware.^[5] Nor does it discuss different operating systems, since the code should be executable on any operating system on which Python, in principle, is available. This chapter rather focuses on the following topics:

Deployment

How can I make sure to have everything needed available in a consistent fashion to deploy Python code and applications? This chapter introduces Anaconda, a Python distribution that makes deployment quite efficient, as well as the Python Quant Platform, which allows for a web- and browser-based deployment.

Tools

Which tools shall I use for (interactive) Python development and data analytics? The chapter introduces two of the most popular development environments for Python, namely IPython and Spyder.

There is also Appendix A, on:

Best practices

Which best practices should I follow when developing Python code? The appendix briefly reviews fundamentals of, ...