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“Body Shopping”

I see somebody has commented on one of my recent posting, and mentioned “body shopping”.

It’s funny how people view contracting/consultancy/permanent employment. From an permanent employees perspective contractors are sometimes viewed as hired gun, with no elegancy to the project, with only an interest in their own pockets ($). Consultants often view their consultancy as “body shopping” them onto projects – I’ve come across ThoughtWorkers who’ve had this view.
Permanent employees often view contractors and consultants as doing the same job as them on the project, but getting paid substantially better, thus cause a rift to develop on the project.
In reality you can be unhappy as a contractor, consultant or permanent employee of a financial institution. Your job is what you make it. If you don’t like your job, then move on. The grass may well appear to be greener on the other side, but in reality it’s often the same just dressed up differently. People would be far better off in their lives if they decided to stop complaining, and took responsibility for their lives, instead of expecting others to do this for them. There is no such thing as a free lunch, if you want to generate $, and want the title, then to quote a old colleague, “it’s time to step up to the plate”.

Senior=Junior Software Engineer

Over the last year or so I’ve been leading larger and larger development teams. Apart from having to deal with the usual egos within the team, battle the constant bitching, and remove the road blocks to hit iterations, I’ve also begun to notice that in some scenarios the “senior” software engineer who has the title of senior blah, in reality acts like a junior blah. One theory a colleague and I have on this Senior=Junior personality trait is that it’s possibly down to the fact that as software engineers move up the ranks, they lose the edge and begin to think that the higher ranking means that they should begin to get the “free lunch”. Well I’ve got news for these Senior=Junior characters, from where I sit in the sell-side of finance the “free lunch” isn’t going to help your careers.

Off topic

Career Defining Project, Beta 1, Velocity

  • Create defining projects (CDP) come along once in a blue moon in finance - primarily because project are confidential, with no public face. If you happen to find a CDP at a financial institution, grab it, and ride the waves, as it could be beneficial for a number of reasons…
  • Hitting beta 1 is a painful process for any project. Hitting beta 1 for a large, super accelerated “agile” project is particularly painful.
  • Cloud Camp London
  • Pushing Data to a Silverlight Client with a WCF Duplex Service
  • EUCALYPTUS - Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems
  • If your doing any WCF, then install this visualizer.
  • Classic HPC
  • TechEd Velocity presentation
  • I’m still amazed how many developers have no idea about SOS. Anyway, if you know what SOS is, then DumpThreadConfig maybe of interest to you.
  • RIA from the Vista Squad
  • Looks like Morgan Stanley are suggesting performance improvements for F# - “1791 F# Perf Apply fold_left performance improvements to research branch (for Morgan Stanley)”
  • .NET StockTrader 2.0 demo at TechEd IT Pro 2008
  • GC

BT Pain

I’m still clueless as to how BT managed to disconnect my phone line twice in two weeks. Madness :( Obviously this killed my broadband, and hence constrained my blogging :(

Bloomberg, Equity Research Web 2.0, Street Budgets and Night Reading

Thought and reading after one of those days on the trading floor that I haven’t had to deal with for 10 years.

  • Unit Testing in Silverlight 2 beta 2
  • ClientAccessPolicy.xml
  • ReSharper 4.0 released - a must have for any Visual Studio developer
  • Bloomberg on Windows Mobile Phones - but its on using Silverlight 2.0 and its not an RIA :(
  • .NET StockTrader 2.0 and Configuration Service 2.0 available
  • Equity Research Web 2.0 style - one view. Does this mean we should expect to see mashup applications from the sell-side using RIA technology?
  • The ultimate RIA?
  • Innovation Zen - wealth managment/private banking
  • NASDAQ Market Replay
  • Wall St. Risk budgets - not unsurprising given the current situation banks are finding themselves in. Real-time and intra-day risk analysis will be good for anyone in HPC land. Could Microsoft have really forseen this with the release of Velocity? ;)

Free: AgDataGrid Suite for Silverlight

Available Free-of-Charge without any licensing or royalties from DevExpress

Visual Studio 10: WPF 3.5SP1 and Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2

I think Microsoft need to provide a cleaner solution to deploying a codebase on different CLR’s in Visual Studio 10.

Silverlight: Build Business Applications?

Looks to me like we could be in for an interesting announcement at PDC 2008 - “a new technology that makes it easy to build business applications in Silverlight” ;)

Silverlight: Building Business Applications
What if you could develop your solutions with the ease pioneered by Access, deploy them like an Internet application, and take advantage of the power of .NET? Learn about an exciting new technology that is all about making business applications for RIA (Rich Internet Applications) much easier to build. In this session, you’ll hear how we’ve made n-tier application development as simple as traditional 2-tier, provided application level solutions to developers, and how we’re doing all of this with the same.NET platform and tools on both the client and on the server.

Could this be Volta for Silverlight?

Sidebar: Visual State Manager

Thoughts for the Velocity Team

Here’s my take on Velocity in answer to the team’s recent posting asking for thoughts on “Would you use this functionality, and how/when ? What kinds of data would you like to cache? What features do you think will make this a better story? What pieces of functionality are completely missing?”

  • I really don’t care about ASP.Net SessionState integration
  • Market data - I want to hold trade, market data (historical and ticking), curves, and reference data
  • Usage from the perspective of a data fabric, grid and SOA. Grid’s are interesting from a investment bank (DataSynapse/Platform)/hedge fund (Digipede) arena - pricing trade being the minimum usage. If I’m pricing thousands of trade per day over my grid, I want to hit a distributed cache to retrieve “data” to avoid hot spots within databases if possible. Running Velocity on all/part of the grid nodes is therefore interesting.
  • Push-based notifications is a must - don’t bother launching without it!
  • Have a look at Gigaspaces, GemFire and Tangosol, and then improve on what they offer today from a distributed cache perspective.
  • Guaranteed data access and resiliency
  • Continuous query engine - VelocityLinq!

Velocity, Silverlight 2 Beta 2, RIA: Adobe Still Leads

So Microsoft announces Silverlight Beta 2 @ TechEd 2008. Is duplex communications really push, or still age old poll?

Microsoft entered the data fabric space with Velocity.

Adobe continues to stretch its lead in the RIA space - Buzzword and now Acrobat. When will Microsoft (Silverlight) catch ConnectNow?

InfoQ has an article on eBay scalability. “Cache Appropriately” is the current best practice my team has been working on recently.