Looking for a little help to understand this world.

I have been a discretionary trader for a couple years. Nothing too serious. I am interested in understanding if automated trading is an area that with time and effort I could learn. I feel pretty strong with my trading abilities, but I would be starting from scratch when it comes to the developing and coding side.

I currently trade with NT8 and a broker. I started trying to develop basic automated strategies with the tools of NT8. It was complicated and what I read is telling me that if im going to put time in learning to code and develop, C# is not that easy or useful with other platforms outside of NT8.

So I found Quantopian. It appears that it might be a good fit, and that Python would be easier and more valuable to begin to learn...

My question is, someday down the road if I have a strategy that I want to deploy, how do I do it?? I cant trade it with my broker via NT8, because I would have code in Python and NT8 requires C#, right???

So if this it true, what platform options would I have? Would I just deploy it through my brokers trading platform (which is not strong)? Im in Canada so I know I am limited with broker choices for futures, should I make the switch to IB?

So you all build and test on here (which from some of the tutorials looks really good), and then use what for actually paper testing and trading your strategies?

If im starting from scratch, I want to start right so I dont end up investing a ton of hours into something to find out that I have to learn C++ or something and all my efforts were for not.

ANY help, guidance and advise is really appreciated!

Thanks,

Justin