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My First Contributions to OpenBB

Authors

I recently merged my first couple of pull requests into OpenBB, the open-source investment research platform. Here's what I contributed and why it matters.

PR #7333: Standardizing Country Inputs with ISO 3166

feat(platform): standardize country inputs with ISO 3166 Country type

OpenBB has dozens of data providers, each with their own way of handling country inputs. Some expect US, others USA, some want United States. This inconsistency creates friction for users and extra work for provider developers.

The Solution

I added a custom Country type backed by a static ISO 3166 JSON dataset. It accepts:

  • Alpha-2 codes: US, CA, GB
  • Alpha-3 codes: USA, CAN, GBR
  • Full names: United States, Canada, United Kingdom
  • Snake case: united_states, united_kingdom

All inputs normalize to alpha-2 codes internally, with access to full country metadata via properties.

from openbb_core.provider.abstract.data import Country

# All of these work:
country = Country("US")
country = Country("USA")
country = Country("United States")
country = Country("united_states")

# Access metadata
country.alpha_2    # "US"
country.alpha_3    # "USA"
country.name       # "United States"
country.numeric    # "840"

Why It Matters

This partially addresses issue #6969 and gives provider developers a reusable type for consistent country handling. No more hardcoded mapping dictionaries scattered across the codebase.

PR #7346: Migrating from pydocstyle to Ruff

chore(lint): migrate from pydocstyle to ruff

This one's a cleanup contribution. pydocstyle was deprecated and archived in November 2023, but OpenBB was still running it in CI alongside Ruff.

The Problem

  • pydocstyle has known bugs that will never be fixed (like D402 false positives)
  • Ruff already has full parity with pydocstyle's rules
  • Running both tools was redundant

The Fix

# ruff.toml - Added "D" rules (pydocstyle equivalent)
select = [
    "D",  # pydocstyle
    # ... other rules
]

Changes:

  1. Added "D" (pydocstyle) rules to ruff.toml
  2. Migrated ignore rules from .pydocstyle.ini to ruff.toml
  3. Removed pydocstyle from CI workflow
  4. Deleted .pydocstyle.ini

One less deprecated tool in the chain, same linting coverage.

Why OpenBB?

OpenBB is building what Bloomberg Terminal could have been if it started today — open-source, extensible, and community-driven. Their platform aggregates data from dozens of financial data providers into a unified API.

As someone working on investment tooling at BCI, contributing upstream to OpenBB felt like a natural fit. The codebase is well-organized, the maintainers are responsive, and there's plenty of room for meaningful contributions.

If you're interested in fintech or quantitative finance, I'd recommend checking out their good first issues.

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