About

I am a professional financial services software developer with a passion for writing well-tested maintainable code, whatever the language.  I am also a rugby player and fan, so expect to see some forced rugby references scattered through-out these pages.

My masters degree in Physics gives me a logic mind, but at the start of my programming career this left me with a lack of theoretical knowledge, and definitely an inability to remember or work out what the seemingly hundreds of TLA’s stood for.  So that was hopefully the only unexplained three letter acronym (TLA) you will see on this site.  I aim to write my blogs assuming as little knowledge as possible, so with any luck if should be as digestible for those starting out on their coding journey as those with plenty more experience than myself.

My career after university started with a stretch as a business analyst in financial services, where I got familiar with designing systems to calculate the risk on equity derivatives and exotics. I completed my level 1 CFA exam in this time.  During my first few years, I quickly realized that programming was a skill I had the potential to be pretty good at.  I fell into programming with a passion and haven’t looked back, the only problem is that the more I learn, the more I realize there is to learn!

Along the way I have coded in Java, Scala (still the programming language I would dream in if I dreamed in programming languages), C#, Python, R, MATLAB, and been exposed to some ‘big data’ solutions using Spark, Cassandra, Azure SQL DW (now called Azure Synapse) and Azure Databricks.

I am very open to feedback or suggestions on anything that I write in these pages, so don’t feel shy to tell me I’m an idiot or there is a better way to do things.  I’m all ears.

Education

• University of Oxford: Master of Physics MPHYS – 2:1
• CFA Level 1
• ITIL Foundation
• Functional Programming Principles in Scala / Functional Program Design in Scala

Experience

• Nephila Climate, Feb 2018 – Present: Technology Lead [C#, Python, R, MATLAB]
• Nephila Advisors UK, July 2015 – Feb 2018: Analyst Developer [Scala, Spark, Cassandra, Tableau | Azure Cloud, C#, ExcelDNA]
• UBS Investment Bank, September 2014 – July 2015: Analyst Developer, Global Equity Derivatives Core Risk IT [Java, DataSynapse, Oracle]
• Celer Technologies, Jan 2015 – Jun 2015 (part time): Contractor, developed TWAP/VWAP algorithm for FX products
• UBS Technology Graduate, Sep 2012 – Sep 2014:  Business Analyst, Global Asset Management IT

What else?

• As the tagline suggests, I am a rugby player and fan.  I am bored of reading about cooking recipes, cakes, flying ducks and deep-pan pizza factories with multiple choices of cheese, so my code examples will be rugby based.