Unbound Developer

I needed to create a sophisticated Web Portal, and I needed it fast. I could have gone the ASP.NET or a PHP route, but I wanted to do Rails because I just knew I had to. I am actually joking and you can see why below. 

2 years ago

The days of .COM boom and bust are long gone. The previously glorious technology conglomerates that employed tens of thousands of engineers are now just a shadow of themselves. Everything is outsourced or off-shored to some degree, so that the companies of today can focus on what they do best: their core business. I've lived in the IT reality for quite some time, though I must admit that I was lucky to outlive some of the cost cutting. The financial industry, especially that of proprietary trading, lived in a bit of a different world up until very recently.

In my other blog post (In Search of a Perfect Hash Map), I looked at various Hash Table implementations and found the rde::hash_map to have some stellar characteristics. What I was actually looking for, was a comprehensive replacement for the STL. A library that I could use right away without changing a lot of existing code. Unfortunately, no such library exists.

Have you ever tried using one database and then had to switch to another? I did and it was quite painful. In fact I had to support both SQLServer Express and MySQL at the same time. Luckily, I had a leg up: I was switching from MSSQL to MySQL, so I already had some C++ ODBC code written. But I was still up for a surprise.

Modern financial applications handle megabytes of data every minute. And having to deal with stock options and spreads... Needless to say, I've realized that my programs needed some fine-tuning. Most of my apps have to subscribe to all the OPRA (24 multicast channels blasting stock option prices), Stock NBBO (National Best Bid & Offer prices), some option pricing and volatility data, and more. Overall, its 25+ multicast channels of data blasted at your application at stratospheric speeds.

There are a few usual suspects when hunting for performance bottlenecks:

I've been going through my folders and found an Episode 50 of the Cocoacast show that has never been published. This episode has been sitting on the shelf for quite some time now, so I decided to make it available. I am not particularly good at video editing, so I am putting it out as is. This screencast talks about using NSArchiver and Serialization aspects in Cocoa in general.

I've recently started porting some of my existing iPhone apps to 3.0 SDK beta 5 and immediately ran into "No launchable executable ..." problem. It took me a while to get over this first hurdle but what I found is that the new Xcode garbles some of your project settings while trying to interpret the older project file.

In this Episode, we are delighted to introduce Swaroop. Swaroop is the author of a couple of really great books: A byte of Python, and A byte of Vim. Please join our lively chat about Python, Ruby, and Swaroop himself.

It's kind of sad, but I decided that the interview with Swaroop would have to be my last one at cocoacast.com.
I am suspending the "Unbound Developers Show", at least until I have more time and energy. I will miss all the exciting discussions and the fun people we have interviewed over the short lifetime of the show and hope that I would be able to revive it, perhaps in different format, very soon in the future. - Vlad

Many months ago, when we were just starting off the Cocoacast Business podcast, I decided to write an article about Agile practices in outsourcing environment. Little did I know that I would not get a chance to write it until now. What motivated me to write about this subject? I will be honest: despite working with vendors across the US and the world, despite working for a large multinational corporations, I never had a chance to work with entire teams of people outsourced to a different country, working some ridiculous hours in a time zone that is 10 hours away.