Posts by Philip Stott 132 publicly visible posts • joined 12 May 2007
Am I missing something, or do the final 4th and 3rd paragraph have SEC boss saying mutually exclusive things:
Gensler has insisted for a while that such rules for cryptocurrencies aren't needed.
"The investing public has the benefit of U.S. securities laws. Crypto should be no different, and these platforms, these intermediaries need to come into compliance," Gensler said on telly news today
You're right in that operations should be quick, but really the idea is that subtractions from the buffer are asynchronous, so therfore aren't reliant on the buffer thread for synchronising.
Also, I have only utilised this in. NET for a trading app, so wouldn't like to comment on it's merit for more worthy stuff like health.
Ring buffers a very handy for super fast processing in general.
Check out Martin Fowler's description of the LMAX Architecture
About 25 years ago I worked on a clinical trials system, which by virtue of being available in the U.S. had to adhere to FDA (part 2 IIRC) development guidelines.
Every release had to be audited under those rules and man were they strict - they even audited the comments to ensure that the code they related to were valid.
This obviously makes sense when people's lives were at stake in case of a bug.
Even though I now develop trading systems I still stick to those guidelines, as I think it made me a better developer.
I've been a professional software developer for 30 years and have noticed in myself and colleagues that we generally seem to inhabit the lower rungs of the autism ladder.
I'm working with a guy right now who is particularly difficult, and I believe it's because he generally can't see other people's point of view.
Perhaps there's an element of this that leads to the snarky comments on FOSS projects ... ?
Completely agree.
I started out as a C then C++ developer. Knocking up UIs in C++ takes forever compared to VB, so as soon as VB3 came out I switched to using that for the UI and anything that needed to to be fast or interact with a C API, I'd develop in C++ and wrap it as an ActiveX control (remember them? Eurgh!).
They interviewed developers with less than 2 years experience?
Maybe it's because I do have 25+ years of commodity trading systems development experience, but IMHO nobody with less than 10 years of experience of developing financial systems should be developing 'SMART' contracts.
Has anyone tried Edge lately (within the last six months or so)?
IMHO it's not a bad browser anymore, once you switch off Bing as the default search engine.
I particularly liked a feature I didn't know about where I recently ordered something online and Edge surfaced a little message saying "There's a voucher code for this" which saved me £10 off just a £50 order.
Sort of been there and done that.
I use eWallet as a password manager.
For a couple of years I used it exclusively on my phone (instead of the desktop version which asks for a password every time), unlocking it with my fingerprint.
After an update it wouldn't let me unlock with a fingerprint and started asking me for the master password again, which I couldn't remember (it's 16 characters of nonsense).
It took me a couple of weeks of daily bum-clenching horror that I couldn't remember it, thinking of all the grief it would cause, until (well lubricated on a Friday night) the password hint phrase - Embiggen not TizWoz - I'd set finally made sense
I'm very sorry to hear that you (and apparently many others) are disillusioned by your career in IT.
At the risk of making myself unpopular, I've spent the last 30 years designing and developing commodity trading systems, and I still love it.
Even if I inherited millions from a mysterious benefactor I'd still code just for fun.
Would be interested to know how many developers are disillusioned compared to infrastructure, desktop support, operations, etc.
I do take your point, but I think that in this (buzzword-bingo) context, "serverless" means non-stateful applications that can make use of scalable lambda (Azure, et al) functions to perform their task.
That's quite hard to do well, as state ultimately has to be stored somewhere, think cookies on a stateless HTTP session.
It's almost like they changed their motto to "Be as evil as you can possibly be".
Sad beause it's well paid career, where diversity of thought is probably more necessary here than every other area outside STEM subjects.
I should also point out that the women developers I have worked with have been an absolute privilege to meet.
Highly competent people, that make the team "better" (hard to define, but think it softens the banter) than all bloke teams.
I'm a bit of an old git, who never really wanted to be a professional software developer, but it's stood me rather well over the last (oh shit, it's now) 30 years or so.
Grew up on Turbo C, then Borland & MS Visual C++, then VB5/6, then C#/. NET since 2002.
Interesting, and I'm genuinely asking here - what are the benefits to me of learning those two languages?
I've spent a a fairly good chunk of my ~ 25 year's developing commodity trading systems, converting traders & analysts Excel workbooks/VBA code trading strategy's into performant, robust, production ready code.
In the hands of sophisticated users like mine Excel is essentially a low/no code solution.
Just look forward to getting paid lots of filthy lucre to clean up after them :-)
You're right about I.T. being a fairly closed shop.
I develop commodity trading systems for a living, and in 3 weeks I start a new job where I've discovered that no fewer than 6 guys (and, sadly, it's nearly always a sausagefest) that I've worked at various banks and trading houses over the years are currently employed!
I was that dumb kid, started out with black powder, then nitrating everything I could find with nitric acid (gun cotton, TNT), thermite, ammonium nitrate & sugar, sulphur & red phosphorus. Its crazy that it was possible to buy that stuff easily. Especially because it was around the time of The Troubles in Ireland.
As you say, it's amazing that we didn't blow ourselves up (although came fairly close more than once).
The most bum-clenchingly awful reply all mistake I've seen happened after the whole company received an email from operations reminding us of the new password policy - 12 characters, mixed case, special chars, etc., and NEVER write them down or share them.
This poor guy (let's call him Gary) meant to forward the following to his mate, but instead replied all: "How the hell do we remember these without writing them down".
This was swiftly followed by the email - Gary would like to recall ...
Which was followed about half an hour later by an email from HR, saying Gary no longer works for Enron (sorry), and has left the building.
Ouch!
Personally, haven't had any black pudding that's tasted of anything other than grease, so that's out.
Also mushrooms only grow on Beezlebub's knob, so they're out too.
Once you've binned them, everything but the beans can be cooked in one big frying pan.
If your eggs aren't frying in the fat from your sausages & bacon you're not doing it right.
Job done.
Wasn't always that way.
I'm showing my age here, but I remember switching from Borland C++ to MS Visual C++ for exactly the reason that all their tools and good documentation could be found on their MSDN discs.
It was once they switched to online docs that the rot set in. Any technologies they wanted to ditch (silerlight anyone) would no longer be linked to, and their favoured new technologies, recently. NET V5 would be favoured in the docs even though NET V4.8 or lower is probably the largest installed base.
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