Category: other

Categories
other process program system

Decisions

How do you make tech decisions? How do you make them under under pressure? In a stressful project situations? When a deadline is approaching and dev delivery is late?

Develop a set of standards that relate to domains (data architecture, solution design, versoning, dependency management…). When you are faced with a decision think about how it relates to your standards which will help you make better decisions faster and also it will make you aware when you compromised and added to you tech debt – your legacy elephant that you need to drag with you.

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other work

CoolTech

… we used to go to work to play with cool technology. Now we have cool technology at home and legacy tech at work.

Categories
other trading

EURCHF1.1999

A trough back to my trading platform days…

What happened was truly a black swan as I can assume algo after algo saw their EURCHF 1.1999 stops hit, and moments thereafter the EURCHF pair crashed to less then 0.75, margining out virtually every single long EURCHF position, before finally rebounding to a level just above 1.00, which is where it was trading just before the Swiss National Bank instituted the currency floor over three years ago.

Over two decades ago, George Soros took on the Bank of England, and won. The SNB took on virtually every single macro hedge fund, the vast majority of which were short the Swiss Franc and crushed them…

Central Banks 1 : Hedge Funds 1

Categories
design other program

Pretotyping

Testing the initial appeal and actual usage of a potential new product by simulating its core experience with the smallest possible investment of time and money.

Cheaply test your thinking “build it, and they will come.” Learn from it as fast as possible. Think 1 PowerPoint slide, single page website, $100 AdWords campaign, product packiging/logo… search Pretotyping for examples.

I think of pretotyping as minimum-viable MPV ie MVMVP. Does sound like an acronym hell but you what I mean.

Categories
innovation other

Friction

Many fintech businesses are about removing friction from chunks of value chain. Can they achieve 10x better service in time to escape big banks?

fintech innovation = removing friction

Categories
other work

Boardroom

Who is in your personal boardroom? The idea is about having access to a core group of people outside of work which hekp you and which you help. Think of the CTOs or devs, startup founders, friends from big banks… Google Dr Zella King to find out more.

Categories
other program

TwilML

Further thoughts on setting up telephony. If you feel your competative advantage is customised in cloud voice app, Twillo is an option. Full REST imtegration is available for every step of the caller experience.

Categories
design other

Wireframing

As the teams work in different locations, MockFlow lets you easily share wireframes online. We use PrtScr tool to capture and annotate changes to designs to feedback cutting the comms loop super short.

Categories
other system telephony

Telephony

To remain balance sheet light you need to be cognisant of adding any unnecessary complexity to your tech setup. If you need a local phone number use virtual phone numbers from Sonetel or Sipgate and forward to an IVR or a local number. Skype To Go is an option too but as of early 2015 geographic coverage is limited.

Categories
other process

Versioning

SVC or Mercurial or Git or TFS. Pick one and make a use case for it across the organisation beyond the IT. We like cloud-native service. Check that it integrates with the key Dev / Data / Modelling tools and that it doesn’t create an admin overhead for the IT. Structure versioning so that picking up a version you can create the full deploy so include dependences like data model, scripts, server configs. If you cannot create a runnable deploy you are missing something. You don’t want to waste time chasing loose ends.