Blarg. I've restarted this post four times now and still not sure what the best approach is. So I think I'm just going to start from where we are now, discuss where we came from and finally where we plan to go. Considering we're at a stand still it seems like a good idea to go over what we've been through and waste some time explaining why we're...stuck.
I'm not going to lie to you, I'm not a developer. I took a few semesters at NAIT, read a book on learning PHP in 24 hours, sign up to every beta project I hear about, even follow TechCrunch and Mashable on a daily basis to see what start ups are out there, but I'm not a developer. I hadn't even looked at any form of source code in at least a year or two. And that book on PHP? It had been purchased five years ago and since been somewhat outdated. So when Arturo emailed me with a link to the Empire Avenue api asking if I was in, I got little nervous.
Arturo's always been financially minded so naturally Empire Ave was right up his alley from the get go. However, unlike real life, it was pretty hard to replicate relatively accurate stock trends. We had to figure out what, if anything, still applied with somewhat quantifiable analysis.
Clearly the solution was to have a bunch of drinks and figure out what still applied to the equation. The biggest problem we found was that individual stock prices were speculative and subject to change for arbitrary reasons based on too many undefined factors. Unfortunately aside from a couple user profile related api calls nearly everything else had to do with just that, stock price.
After looking through the api data for some time we found what we were looking for, dividend return data. If we could figure out how many credits each user was spitting out as a dividend return to it's investors each day then we could accurately figure out who was the best investment.
It was like predicting the lottery before the numbers had been pulled. Or like getting unemployment insurance for being homeless. You didn't have to do anything, really, and your wealth would still increase. What's more is that your earned credits wouldn't disappear with market trends because it was actually in your Empire Avenue bank account as cold hard cash, ready to be invested others or spent on advertising or upgrades. And so long as we could nail the calculation and get the right information, we'd be in business.
Now that we knew what data we wanted to work with we, well I, had to figure out how we were going grab, manipulate and finally return that data. Gulp.
