In large financial institutions, there are hundreds, or even thousands, of developers working on in-house applications. For a small hedge fund with a small team, the software development lifcycle should be shortened as much as possible and the focus should be on iterating quickly to fix bugs and deliver new functionality. Instead of developing custom applications, a suite of web-based applications allow you to avoid dealing with deployment issues while allowing you to design user-friendly interfaces by leveraging well-established and thoroughly tested libraries such as jQuery and Bootstrap.