CS 102 · Year 1 · Semester 2 · 4 credits · Computer Science

Programming II & Object-Oriented Design

From ad-hoc actuarial scripts to robust, type-safe, and production-grade financial software engines.

Season 1 · 8 episodes

Code and Solvency: Engineering the Actuarial Engine

A junior actuarial developer at a growing annuity provider must replace a fragile legacy pricing script with a robust, production-grade actuarial software library before a multi-million-pound bulk purchase annuity deal faces regulatory scrutiny.

Protagonist · Maya Lin, Junior Actuarial Software Engineer at Apex Life & Pension

Setting · The Quantitative Modelling Desk at Apex Life, Edinburgh, under impending Prudential Regulation Authority review

Stakes · A faulty reserving calculation or crashing valuation run will trigger severe capital add-ons from regulators and forfeit a sixty-million-pound bulk purchase annuity bid.

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Episodes

Season finale: Maya deploys a modular, mathematically verified, fully typed, and continuous-integration-guaranteed annuity engine that prices complex tranches in milliseconds and passes the regulatory audit flawlessly.

From the lecturer: Welcome to CS 102. In CS 101, you learned how to write imperative scripts to compute actuarial values. In this course, you transition from writing transient scripts to engineering enterprise-grade actuarial libraries. Modern actuarial practice—whether building asset-liability models under IFRS 17, stochastic reserving engines for Solvency II, or high-throughput pricing APIs—demands professional software architecture, strict typing, automated test suites, and deterministic continuous integration pipelines. As you watch each lecture, do not merely view the screen: keep an open terminal on one side and an engineering notebook on the other. Before implementing any class or pattern in Python, sketch its UML class hierarchy and memory references on paper. When we derive computational complexity bounds for recursive actuarial algorithms, trace the call stack step-by-step by hand. Every formula and design pattern in this course will be implemented as production-grade Python code adhering to strict static type checking with mypy and packaged to modern PEP 621 standards. By the conclusion of Week 14, you will have built, tested, documented, and published a complete actuarial cash-flow and annuity valuation library ready for deployment in production actuarial workflows.

Cold open

It is 8:14 PM on a Tuesday. Maya stares at a four-thousand-line single-file Python script called pricing_final_v12.py. When she updates the discount rate curve for a simple immediate annuity portfolio, the entire script crashes with a global variable mutation error, producing negative policyholder liabilities.

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Transcript

Model actuarial cash flow engines using encapsulation, polymorphism, and composition over inheritance.
Implement the Strategy pattern to decouple cash flow projections from discounting mechanisms.
Apply the Factory pattern and SOLID principles to build extensible insurance policy architectures.