A Brief History of Time

Over the years, I have witnessed deep changes to the way we build software. Once each progressive wave has occurred, it is hard to imagine life before that progression. Examples include:

• Unit testing
• Cloud computing
• The SaaS approach to software delivery

Through recent conversations with friends — coupled with observing some recent trends — I believe we are on the cusp of another iteration within business software.

In 2022, the company of the future will be all-in with a cloud provider such as AWS, with the provider handling all the ‘hard’ computer-science problems. …

TL;DR — spend some time on your own, you’ll love it.

Siem Reap is home to the stunning temple complexes of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom (amongst other smaller sites), and a vital stop for those visiting Cambodia and the wider region.

Late last year, some friends and I decided to participate in the yearly Angkor Wat Half Marathon, but as we got closer to the date they all dropped out — with the exception of some friends who were literally just flying in for the day itself. The excuses were good e.g. one friend had a stroke, one left…

As always, all thoughts and opinions are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

I was not lucky enough to attend re:Invent 2018 (the annual AWS conference in Las Vegas), but I kept very close watch on the new services we released! The purpose of this article is to add some commentary around how some of the newly announced services are relevant to financial services.

I very much look forward to feedback and additional comments around where people see other opportunities that I missed.

Amazon Timestream

Time series databases are a mainstay of capital markets. In many cases…

There are too many silos in the Enterprise. I have come to believe that they are the principle reason for the success or failure of projects and initiatives.

The DevOps movement is the most well known attempt at breaking down the silo between the ‘run’ and the ‘build’ aspects of running technology. However, it only covers a limited set of silos — there are many more, and I will discuss some of them in this blog post:

• Applications and Infrastructure
• Business and Technology
• FinTech and the Enterprise
• A Note on Business Application Support

Applications and Infrastructure

Once an Enterprise decides to build its…

In a previous article, I talked about how we need to come together as a community and Make Banking Technology Great Again. However, this was all from a very high level, and so now I want to give some specific recommendations and recommend some books to read. The world of technology moves too quickly, and there’s just too much to know — so this is a summary for a great developer who has been away from the state of the art for some time. I’m sure I’m missing lots of great advice, so please let me know in the comments!

The agile mind

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Introduction

Commonly referred to by the misnomer ‘serverless’, Functions as a Service offer a compelling proposition — the ability to run code without having to worry about server provisioning, scaling and infrastructure-level security. Add in potentially huge cost savings, and it’s a no-brainer for many use cases.

AWS, Google Cloud and Azure all have FaaS solutions, and it is likely that large financial institutions will have relationships with at least 2 of these players. In this article, I will look at how best a multi-cloud FaaS setup could be architected.

June 2018 Functionality Matrix

One of the major revolutions in software over the last decade has been the shift to the cloud. For many people, while they have heard the term, it doesn’t mean much — and why it’s a good thing means even less. This article gives a brief introduction to the cloud and why it is good for asset managers.

What is cloud computing?

For as long as finance has been computerised, there has been the need for powerful servers which crunch through large data sets and store details about the transactions being booked. …

Introduction

I have had the good fortune to work in many different teams in many different countries, and have pretty much spent my whole career trying to think of ways we can improve development processes within financial technology companies. When I speak to my friends and contacts who work within technology in big banks, they often complain about feeling disconnected from the very things that led them to pursue that career in the first place. Once upon a time, I believed that if you did anything as a job for long enough, you would learn to hate it. …