Intro

Hello!! I am a Software Engineer with a Master's degree from the Univerisy of California, Irvine. After graduating in December '23, I am now working as a Cloud Applications Developer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. If you're a recruiter, please check out my resume and projects and reach out to me @ thakkaa1@uci.edu or amanbthakkar@gmail.com or DM me on LinkedIn!.

Hobbies and Interests

During COVID when I was "Working From Home", I got extremely interested in finance, the markets, and cryptocurrencies. I watched Andrew Lo's MIT lectures on the basics of finance and then proceeded to complete a course on Financial Engineering where I learnt more about derivatives and their pricing. And of course, Cryptocurrencies + Markets = Decentralized Finance! I took part in the first ever DeFi MOOC organized by UC Berkeley and received an Honorary Tier NFT as a certificate for my efforts. I thought of pursuing a Masters in Financial Engineering as well, but ultimately decided to continue Computer Science at UC Irvine.

Though I haven't been actively talking about finance and crypto for the last 2 years (co-inciding with what can be called as the crypto bear market), my interest in this field is alive. Feel free to reach out in case you want to chat!

I am also an avid football (soccer) fan and absolutely love both playing and watching it. I've also played Fantasy Premier League religiously every year for the past 12 years (minus the last two - but I'll be back soon). I support Chelsea FC and it is my dream to work at the club one day.

Blog Posts

During the time I talked about above, I wrote a few blog posts on mathematical models related to pricing of cryptocurrencies, and am particularly fond of one related to the Power Law Oscillator. An entire page on this site is dedicated to it. I wrote some other posts too, which you can find here. These aren't really fancy indicators, but they may be useful to give a good indication on multi-year bottoms and tops.

Why This Website

This website was actually first borne out of a desire to not need to run the Python script for the oscillator daily on my local machine.

I wanted to host it somewhere so I could just look it up daily with minimal effort. I thought I'd share it publicly, but then I thought I'd want to see how I could keep track of how many people actually visited my website. I could have used Google Analytics but I didn't want to.

So I decided to create a full-stack website and keep track of the visits myself. That meant setting up a Github Pages frontend, an EC2 instance for the backend, buying a domain and pointing it to both Github as well as my backend server, enabling HTTPS on EC2, and so on.

And then if I was doing all that, I might as well turn it into a personal website. So I did. Thank you for reading!