elements of a good tech contexx

* paid work. The income will sustain your effort. Unpaid work won't last beyond a few weeks (a few hours/week) of aggregate "investment"
* professional project, not personal/home/school projects
* paid users, the more the better
* important to the users. The higher the financial value the better
* mainstream technology, in-demand technology
* encounter real problems -- should be common (but not easy) problems
* Colleagues (teachers would be too ideal) to help out and give pointers

books on MSVS

Most books are too thick and duplicates the very big MSVS documentation

[[ Mastering Visual studio .NET ]], available in Jurong East library, is one of the best but covers VS.net 2003. Covers debugging in-depth.

C++ and c# are the 2 implicit targets.

convenience of SG over US -- some examples

Q: how long do u need to wait on the hotline?

A: 95% below a min across all SG telcos, banks, transportation companies (like airlines), utility companies, government agencies

A: 95% above a min across all US telcos, banks, transportation companies (like airlines), utility companies, government agencies, medical insurers,

 

Q: minimum cost for a reasonable lunch

A: SGD 3 (I can get SGD 2.50) 

A: USD 6 (I can get USD 5) on NYC street

 

Q: # branches of banks, telco, utility providers?

A: much higher in SG. US is mostly online self-service or hotline.

I guess one of the fundamental reasons is the minimum wage accepted by (unskilled) workers. I guess around SGD $1k but in the US most won't accept USD $1k.

cockpit - depend on few things beside printer/smemo

Depend on inet? yes
Depend on BBC? yes
Don't depend on a rack in cockpit
Don't depend on big desk in cockpit
Depend on a phone nearby? maybe have a cordless nearby.

separating (search preparation) hooks, glues, tapes...

--Category 11R (receipts)

--Category 11K (key/lock-related)

--Category 33S (stationeries)
+ anything to do with paper and paper only
+ empty folders

--Category 33H (hardware)
hooks requiring hardware? go with hardware

--Category 55O (organizers)
clips, fasteners, tapes, glue hooks, nail-free hooks

--Category 99Misc (none of the above)
torch light

achievements - all the minor (+major) things

door stopper installed

impact cushion - reducing stress

 

--weekend (9 Mar) after big move

chipaway IRAS

arranged glass delivery

met tanko

research on PUB bill payment

moved stuff out of storhub, well in advance, preventing stress

paid music school in advance -- reducing stress

helped dabao practice piano

made appt and "met" Benny about US tax, in advance

had in-depth discussions on staff loan, reducing stress

arranged xiao chen visits, reducing stress

flattened all carton boxes to make room in store room for other items

in-depth negotiations with wife about cockpit

income vs job satisfaction

Q: Do you prefer a job (under a boss) you are comfortable with, at a typical IT salary? Or do you prefer a job with above-average income, but suppressive boss? In both cases, let's assume long term job security is average (far from ideal), workload is reasonable.

A: I'd favour the income. I feel I can cope with the unfriendly environmental factors.

Health + employability(security) are my real, long term priorities.

Recall the GS experience - workload, job nature, security.

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brank is real differentiator on job market

Suppose you meet a guy from an lesser-known hedge fund. Perhaps a quant strategist, a quant developer, a high frequency trader, a fund manager or the CEO. He could be full time running multiple funds for a few years, perhaps with multiple investors in his funds. How do you know he is not an unemployed high school dropout running his one-man operation out of his parents' garage? His investors might be relatives + friends.

The real evidence is asset under management. Anything below $10m is a tiny fund.

Now you meet another guy, from a HFT software vendor. This time Real evidence is company revenue. If not, then big-name backers.

A simpler evidence of track record is past salary.

In conclusion there are too many people with big words in the resume, but only a fraction having credible track record (brank).

consultants going perm - painful

I have heard the same lament from a recent colleague and a Barcap colleague, and also from many GS colleagues - all perm employees. They all hinted that the decision to quit the previous job and join the new job turned out to be less than foresighted. Basically the new job was not as good as advertised by the interviewers. They were oversold. Now it's too late to retreat.

This is one context where consulting provides cushion, buffer, peace of mind, a clearly visible end of the tunnel and "breathing space". As a perm employee, you may have a lot to worry about before you contemplate quitting the new job. It's a minefield most of us don't want to cross --

* Bonus, reviews...
* You may feel like a quitter. You are supposed to work things out with a cool head, not quit so easily.
* Everyone in the team would say things after you quit (actually they don't.)
* Sacrifice the short term, and hope to get the promised goodies sometime in the future.
* You are supposed to defeat problems not get defeated
* You feel stupid about the last career decision. If you don't quit, mistake is not materialized. You still have a chance to turn it into a success.
* You feel "I can't just job hop like this. No one does this sort of thing. I must try for a year or 2.". Every friend and family say the same to you.
* You feel guilty if you were to quit
* You feel the next job change may be equally unwise, so let's just stick around here.

In this context, a workplace can be a suffocating place. Consultants are used to breathe freer.

math symbols to show in equation editor + blogger

https://support.office.com/en-US/Article/Linear-format-equations-and-Math-AutoCorrect-in-Word-2e00618d-b1fd-49d8-8cb4-8d17f25754f8?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US is good

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/linear-format-equations-and-math-autocorrect-in-word-HA101861025.aspx is recommended by Chao Jen

* partial differential symbol -- \partial _space_ f
* limit of integration --  http://superuser.com/questions/65988/how-can-i-create-limits-of-integration-in-word-2007s-equation-editor
* add tilde or bar or hat over a letter, see http://www.iun.edu/~mathiho/useful/Equation%20Editor%20Shortcut%20Commands.pdf

--blogger
√ 2π
≅(Unicode 2245)
≈(Unicode 2248)
≃(Unicode 2243)
≠
π
σ Δ ϵ λ μ
±
μs (microsec)

2³²

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_letters_used_in_mathematics,_science,_and_engineering has the html versions
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/math/symbols/

## lasting achievements as a techie?

Backdrop: Technological innovation is fast (less so in commercial banking, i was told) so "lasting" means ... maybe 5 to 10 years (rarely longer)?? Few achievements meet this criteria.

See also http://bigblog.tanbin.com/2010/09/accu-and-longevity-compare-with-civil.html, http://bigblog.tanbin.com/2011/02/classical-engineering-field.html

- open source -- software have real lasting values. I guess you can learn to Read their source code -- usually in C.
- [L] contributions to foundation modules such as VM/CLR, compilers, threading library, GC, STL -- real lasting values

What skills contribute to lasting value-add to an organization?

- tuning - DB -- needed in many big and small systems
- tuning - low latency systems -- more rare
- [L] instrumentation i.e. refactor/design a given (complex) system to make it easy to trace and follow
- [L] ? introspection - tend to be rather powerful in many new languages
- ? interpreting bytecode; decompilers
- ? system security; white hat hacker

[L = I feel most of these skills are low-level]

In theory almost everything can be learned by a young guy in a few years provided they get full (rare!) access to all source code and manage to make sense of it all. However, look at how many bright young people become kernel developers even though so much open source operations systems exist.

stay hands-on in financial IT

Better stay hands-on in financial IT, whether you come back to US or stay in S'pore long term. In Singapore, most hands-on developer jobs are less ideal (for older guys) than management jobs. Majority (above 70%) of my Singapore peers of my age group try to build a career path away from hands-on. Among the other 30%, some try to stay as hands-on architects or hands-on tech leads. If we were to stay in S'pore, such roles are ok till age 45. In the US, that age limit seems to be 55. Big question is whether you could become and survive as a hands-off manager. I think Yang tried but he still relies heavily on his tech skill. My competitive strengths (if any) in management roles are

* attention to detail
* reasonably good domain knowledge
* good rapport with some developers
* experience working overseas -- many finance projects are global in nature

am fast as Wall St developer

* I grew fast enough for GS. Compared to other banks, GS has 50% of the headcount for any given workload.
* I was fast enough for the Lab project lead. Their standard is even higher than GS. The Lab project lead didn't complain about my delivery speed though he pointed out Piroz was more experienced and faster.
* Citi senior mgr didn't complain about my delivery speed at all. Not even once. I was working at a comfortable pace.
* I worked alongside Lab49 consultants who are battle tested fast-coders over many years.
* in every job i managed to steal time for self-study - swing, python, secDB, rv, options, c++, non-blocking I/O, c++ debugger, bond math...
* many trading desk dev teams are elite teams with tiny headcounts. I survived some.
* I generally pay more attention to details than other developers. I could, if I want, switch off this attention.

I guess there are super-developers who are really faster in some specific contexts, but overall it's hard to be a fair judge considering quality, prod support capability, error checking, knowledge-transfer, automated-testing, help to other team members, client-orientation, maintenance cost, system flexibility, readability, architecture soundness...

hooks, endpoints, callbacks, template methods

Spring Integration says an endpoint's connects your custom "application code" to the messaging framework. This sounds similar to the template method. Also sounds similar to the onMsg() callbacks. All of them follow this same basic pattern -

In the generic flow diagram of this framework, "at this particular spot in the diagram, call me via my interface method."

front office developers for fx options trading desk

Question: Guess how many developers are needed in the fx option trading desk at one of world's biggest investment banks? Note this desk handles all fx option trading for the entire bank.
Answer: about 20 world wide including consultants.

The other trading desk in the FX space is the FX cash desk. Not sure how many developers.

If there are 20 similar trading desks in the bank, then total number of _desk_specific_ developer head count is going to be around 500, at most 1000. I think this is a very small percentage (5%?) of total IT head count.

In 2007 GS had about 6000 IT headcount. This bank is probably double. I'd say at least 10,000 IT head count. I would estimate less than 5% of them are directly funded by trading desks.

Now I know why front office trading is a rare opportunity.

Risk developers are classified into 2 types
- some are dedicated to a desk
- some are firm-wide

Asia strengthening, US waning?

For a job seeker, the real effect is in currency. Don’t be fooled by the mass media --

Growth? Asia is probably faster, but revenue and profit volume still is a fraction of the US.

In term of brank, Wall Street is still considered a market more mature more developed, and a (imperfect) role model.

Most trading systems are designed in US or Europe.

Profit margin per deal is higher in Asia (Indonesia...) than developed, efficient US/Europe market. A "deal" can be an issue, a block trade or a sale of a trading model.

A model is an intellectual property developed by a sell-side, useful to the sell-side and also the buy-side

c++ memory leak detection ideas

cmemleak traces malloc() and free()

http://www.flipcode.com/archives/How_To_Find_Memory_Leaks.shtml is a dated (2000) but readable and detailed treatment

Three easy ways to use GlowCode: (1) use it to launch your application, (2) attach GlowCode to a running program, or (3) link GlowCode directly into your application. No source code or build change or post-build step required.

VisualStudio offers
_CrtSetDbgFlag ( _CRTDBG_ALLOC_MEM_DF | _CRTDBG_LEAK_CHECK_DF ); // I guess there's no such thing in Linux

rttp

put/get/subscribe. rmi api 1000 writes/sec
Q: any 4th operation like sql-like query?
Q: indexing?

subscription with predicates
Q: how does subscription work again? what does it do?
Q: MOM?

Master node -> replication nodes. conflated updates?

optimistic locking -> concurrent modification exception

code quality
unit test
heavy engineering
no biz user interaction
Q: quality vs quantity

-- sales pitch
ease of use. coherence is a complicated product. not many people know how to use it
proven. "look, it works"

--users
eq finance ie sec lending (front office, latency sensitive)
cash eq
Exchange traded derivatives
futures
fx
clearing
STP
-----------eq deriv data services
biggest client is risk batch running on a compute grid
100G in memory, 400G in DB

tech skills:
#1 Java
#2 design patterns
SQL. All tuning is handled by DBA
threads
java sockets
IO
net
restful web service

learning MOM

To become competent and confident with MOM, we need to keep our focus at the high-level such as architectural trade-offs.

In contrast, when learning concurrency, java collections, java OO,  or c++, we need to become conversant at a low level.

How about distributed cache? low and high level.

some tech infrastructure features in a high frequency eq trading (hedge fund)

* gemfire distributed cache. DB? latency too high.
* tibrv
* between internal systems (not with external systems) -- FIX based protocol
* swing trader station + OMS on the server-side + smart order router + connectivity
* there's more math in risk system; but the highest latency requirements are on the eq front office systems.