I’ve always been impressed by Web technologies since the day I first got a PC and an internet connection. Many things have changed since then, and web development is no longer limited to building websites. Nowadays, apps are built on web technologies with many fascinating front-end, back-end frameworks, database architectures, cloud computing, etc. Services are brought to the cloud and accessible to everyone having a web browser with a decent internet connection.
I believe financial and actuarial domains make no exception in this global movement. However, the transition seems a little bit slower than in some other areas. Many actuarial applications, in my point of view, could be much more user-friendly with better UX / UI, suitable for every device (PC, tablet, smartphone, etc.), and also faster with cloud computing.
Last year, I started learning React and Flask (at first from the two wonderful online courses CS50 and CS50x offered by Harvardx and then from many other free resources available on the internet). Then I came up with a personal project to bring these technologies into the actuarial modeling areas. The “baby” app was called Varathon. As naive as I am, I even registered a domain name and made a website for it, hoping it to become a real business and make big news someday. (It’s still accessible at varathon.fr if you want to take a look at it, but I will certainly take it down one of these days.)
And you can probably guess the rest. Yeah, I sadly ended the project after building the UI & database (that can be integrated with existing modeling software). The modeling part was abandoned due to a lack of market visibility. To be more precise, I realized it would potentially take me a lot of time to finish a product that could only serve a tiny market. And to be honest, with my limited resources, I don’t even know how to compete with existing actuarial software editors to win a market share. I couldn’t even persuade my company to switch to my app.
Anyway, here’s an overview of what I’ve done for this project
So that’s the end of my 2020’s project. Not my first failure, and certainly not my last one … But I don’t regret doing it at all because I’ve learned so much throughout this project. Still being passionate about web development, I just want to dedicate a blog post to this failed project, as a souvenir … before failing at my next project probably lol.
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