Category: Tech

There’s an old saying – Never buy a pig in a poke – which roughly means “don’t pay for something unless you’ve seen it”. It was one that came to mind as I forked out for the Parallels pre-release upgrade a week or so ago.

Parallels is a virtual machine environment for the Mac, allowing you to run Windows applications even when OS X is running as your primary Operating System. Parallels 3 has just been released, but upto a week or so ago you could pay for an upgrade (before getting the actual software) with a discount. This is a classic case of pig/poke alarm, but I thought Parallels had built such good marketting momentum over the last year or so that they would do anything to hurt that.

I paid for Parallels less than a year ago, and so I was already a bit miffed about forking out my hard-earned bucks for an upgrade so soon. However, it had one feature I was particularly interested in, that of 3D video support. I don’t play many games, but it would be nice to play Half Life 2 occasionally wihout having to boot into Windows using Boot Camp.

I was a little surprised to hear that Parallels were willing to sell this functionality without a big test phase, but they mentioned both ‘Half Life 2’ and the phrase ‘at near native speeds’ explicitally in their advertising, so I decided to purchase sight-unseen.

Of course, it was too good to be true. HL2 doesn’t run anything close to native speed, and is pretty much unplayable, even on my beefy pimped-out iMac. The software is definitely not production-ready, and definitely not worth the cash of the upgrade. Sure enough, there was a pile of stones, and not a pig, in my bag.

Parallels had better fix this up pretty soon or all of their good marketting is going to drain away in the direction of VMWare. May the Mac virtualisation games commence!

D.B.A. was fun 2 weeks ago, so we’re going to try it again as an eXtreme Tuesday venue. More details here.

One of the many enjoyable parts to my new job is when I get to meet some of my actual New York Stock Exchange colleagues from our famous office on Broad St (the TransactTools office is a 5 minute walk up Broadway.) The people I’ve met so far are a good bunch, lacking some of the harshness I’ve found from some previous organizations. Moreover some of them have huge amounts of experience being here.

As I said in my last blog entry, NYSE is in an interesting space right now, and is changing a lot what with merging with other exchanges, pushing new technologies, and the like. It’s not just the new blood that’s driving this change – it’s the people who’ve been around a while too.

Take Ray Pellecchia, for instance. He’s been with the Exchange for nearly 20 years. When he joined the firm I hadn’t even started secondary school. With that comes a lot of experience, and of course some interesting stories! But not wanting to rest on his laurels, Ray is actually one of the people driving new ideas here. One of them is the NYSE Hybrid Talks blog at http://hybridtalk.nyse.com/ .

As a newbie to the exchange, this blogs helps me get a better idea of what we’re doing, but it’s also an internet-friendly way of telling the world of the new things we’re up to. And as a final kicker, the discussions in the comments allow Ray to interact with NYSE customers, and those customers to interact with each other, in ways that were hitherto impossible.

So NYSE is certainly one of the older firms here in the US, but is embracing new business and technology practices in exciting ways. It’s going to be a fun ride!

As I mentioned in my earlier posting, one of my first tasks here at NYSE TransactTools is to hire some great developers. The engineering team right now is 11 people strong, but we’re looking to grow that significantly.

I’m obviously biased, but I think this is something of a unique opportunity. Clearly we’re a technology-focussed business unit, so we don’t have what can often feel like the ‘support focus’ of the IT organization of a bank, yet we’re still in the financial domain and have the backing of being part of the New York Stock Exchange‘s exciting growth. Furthermore, it’s an NYC-based finance job, in the financial district, yet the atmosphere here is dress down (and yes, we really do have a pool table in the office!)

The actual technology is pretty cool too. The core of what we do is a financial messaging engine, responsible for processing many thousands of messages per second. We’re not the only people to do that though – where we’re unique is technologically that we add some interesting functionality around the core messaging server, and also our new position within NYSE is allowing us to offer some industry-leading integration options with the rest of NYSE’s networking technology (go look at our swanky new website for more on that side.)

Most of what we do is implemented in Java. A lot of it is pretty hard-core low level networking / multi-threaded code to allow the performance we need. We also have some web work happening since all of our configuration & administration is done through Java web applications (with a fair bit of AJAXey goodness throw in.) We are moving to a XP / Scrum based development methodology. We’ve already got card walls, 2-week sprints, daily stand up meetings and some of the guys even started pair programming this week. I’m working on getting Continuous Integration going (no surprises there!) and we’re going to keep going from there.

As of today we’re looking for Java developers, specifically ones with real experience doing the kind of hard-core code that makes up the core of what we do. We’ll no doubt be looking for some less experienced folk later, but not right now.

The official job posting can be found on our career’s page. If you’re interested in knowing more, drop me a line!

My ex-employer as of only 6 weeks ago have been bought by Sungard – I didn’t see that one coming while I was there!

Like Marc, I predict there’ll be a bit of employee turnover from this. Although I can see how the acquisition favors Finetix and Sungard as organizations, I’m sure there are some Finetix’ers who will be disappointed by their firm losing its boutique status. If any of you are interested in a job, let me know!

Here’s a little gotcha for anyone using Ubuntu 7.04 (it might have been in 6.10 too, I’m not sure) and some amount of shell scripting.

If you refer to /bin/sh anywhere, Ubuntu out of the box points to a shell called dash and not (as would normally be the case) bash. Dash doesn’t have all the features bash has though (the flip side is that it’s a lot faster, apparently), so in some cases (including a few I just ran into) your scripts may cease to work.

The solution? Change your scripts to explicitly use /bin/bash or use the sledgehammer approach and relink /bin/sh to /bin/bash.

And yes, despite going point-haired, I haven’t escaped from the land of build monkey.

Today I got my 200th connection on LinkedIn. It’s not something I’ve deliberately gone about achieving, but now I have a ‘network’ that size I’m wondering if there’s something useful I can do with it? Maybe get a Stewie Griffin-esque mind control device and work on my plans of world domination?

We’re still trying to figure out a venue for eXtreme Tuesday. This week we’ll be at D.B.A. at 41 1st Ave between 2nd and 3rd streets. If nothing else their beer selection is very impressive.

I’ve mentioned this briefly in a couple of posts now, but I have a new job. Finetix was a great introduction to a financial software career in New York City, but my new role at NYSE TransactTools (or TT as I’ll refer to them from now on) was just too good to pass up.

So who is this new bunch I’ve got involved with? Until about 4 months ago, TT were a fairly young independent software company producing messaging software for financial institutions. Historically, most of their customers use this software for talking to each other in a protocol called FIX. The most typical scenario for this is when buy-side firms (investment funds, that kind of thing) want to send trading requests to sell-side firms (the investment broker/dealers like Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns. ) That’s by no means the only scenario, but it gives you an idea of the kind of the environment I’m talking about.

4 months ago TransactTools were acquired by the New York Stock Exchange. This is part of NYSE’s growth into new business areas. The interesting thing for TT is that they have big financial backing now, a whole new business stream to draw from, and yet are able to carry on working in the dynamic environment they were used to as a startup.

This alone was pretty compelling to me: the opportunity to work for a product firm and apply 5 years of experience in consulting to a longer-term game, to stay in finance, and yet work in an environment I far prefer to that of a typical Wall Street bank. However there was more.

Firstly, a member of the senior management team here is a guy called Murray White who I’ve worked with before and massively respect. He’s a bit of a handful sometimes, but one of the brightest and most honest guys I’ve met in my career. In short, he’s a great mentor. The next thing is that I’ve been given the opportunity to lead the development team here at TT. It’s not just a matter of taking on existing management responsibilities – I’m also being encouraged to bring in my own ideas and help shape this team into one that will be able to rise to the new business challenges. Of course, a lot of these ideas will be XP / Scrum practices, as appropriate.

There are of course a lot of challenges in taking on this new role. One of the biggies is that this is the first time I’ve worked at a software product firm for 5 years, and the way such organizations work with regard to release management is quite different to that of an IT organization with only 1 or a few customers. I’m sure I’ll be blogging more on this in the future. Also, leading a team as a permanent employee is somewhat different to that as just a consultant, so I have things to learn there too.

All in all, I’m very excited by this move. It is a huge opportunity for me, and a chance to approach software delivery from a different angle to that I would take as a consultant. I certainly plan to continue blogging, but the tone and content will probably change somewhat. Expect more rants and questions than usual!

I’ll end mentioning another big task I have to start with – that of hiring some great individuals – but I’ll be talking more about that another time!