Category: Uncategorized

  • OpenFIGI: Currencies and Spot FX Pairs

    Anyone who knows me knows that I have an unhealthy interest in open symbologies.  Until we have a common reference for identifying things, it is difficult to build higher-order open connectivity (such as reusable APIs). In the financial instrument space, the best symbology I am aware of is OpenFIGI.  Whilst it is maintained by Bloomberg, it […]

  • virtualenvwrapper installation on MacOS in 2018

    This post is to try and save someone the 15 minutes I stupidly wasted! If you installed Python via Homebrew, it now names the python executable python2 (and similarly pip becomes pip2). When you then try to install virtualenvwrapper you get the error: [crayon-675a8ec723e8d678952748/] Links such as https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11507186/python-virtualenv-no-module-named-virtualenvwrapper-hook-loader are absolutely correct – they were just written before […]

  • Cheese grater cost management.

    Ned’s new term of the day: Cheese grater cost management. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to build great culture at Argomi, and as part of that I was thinking about where I’ve seen team morale suffer in the past. I’ve decided that in difficult times, big companies suffer from cheese grater cost […]

  • Product/Market fit at large Financial Institutions

    I had an interesting realisation today regarding prioritisation at a startup vs a large Financial Institution. As any startup mentor will advise, the key point to early growth is product/market fit. Without that, one is essentially producing a product that isn’t quite right for the market in which it is aimed… In a startup, this […]

  • Class Libraries With Microservices

    Back in the olden days, everyone went nuts for Service Oriented Architecture.  Many consultant dollars were made.  Everyone temporarily forgot who Fred Brooks was (No Silver Bullet). Time moved on, the hype died down.  But just like a Jeffrey – IT COMES BACK.  Yes, I’m talking about micro-services. Martin Fowler has a really nice piece on this topic: http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html where […]

  • Argomi

    I quit my job a few months ago and returned to Asia to start on the next chapter of my life: Argomi. Argomi is a personal finance manager for people comfortable with interacting with online services for money management.  We aim to give our users advice about their investments, easy access to financial services which are otherwise perhaps […]

  • AngularFire 2.x.x

    I recently struggled a little to find good documentation on AngularFire 2.x.x – basically the version post when Google bought out FireBase.  If you search for Firebase and AngularJS, or even if you go to http://angularfire.com, it all goes to the older version. However, there is some fairly good documentation on the GitHub repo (https://github.com/firebase/angularfire) […]

  • Dummy Files in Unit Tests

    (Recovered from my old Blog). Let’s say that you have an application which accepts a filepath as part of its interface. When unit testing, you may have some dummy files which you use to test the interface. However, getting the full path of these test files can be a pain. Assuming that the files are […]

  • Load a CSV file into an ArrayList

    (Recovered from my old Blog). It isn’t hard to write code which iterates through files, cuts them up and loads them into an ArrayList. And if the delimiting character isn’t a comma? No problem, it isn’t hard to add that functionality. And if you want to skip the first set of lines because you’re paginating […]

  • Custom XStream Converter

    (Recovered from my old Blog). XStream is a great utility for serializing objects to XML – and then back again. The default XML output is neat enough – albeit a little verbose (using fully qualified class names for example). There are plenty of tutorials available showing how to use XStream aliases to clean up the […]