What started as a side project in Hong Kong turned into one of those "incredible journey" stories - with the help of a most excellent co-founder, we took that side project and turned it into a... moderately successful SaaS application (with many happy customers. But sadly not _that_ many). We took the startup on the Ignite accelerator (Manchester, cohort #9) and learned a huge amount – initially, how to deal with lots and lots of people telling you your idea isn't very good – met a load of excellent people and set up an office in Shoreditch to sell sell sell.We chose not to take investment, instead taking the much more sensible idea of spending our own money until it was untenable – eventually winding up the office and bringing it down to a more manageable organisation to support the existing customers and add new customers at a gentler pace.

I returned to Daiwa in 2019, eventually returning to full-time employment. Part of this role was dedicated to improving processes within the team, migrating from SVN to Git, improving and automating regression testing, migrating to a standardised Git workflow and instituting code reviews as well as working on the remote/hybrid working policy after the pandemic began.

Late in 2018, I got an offer I couldn't refuse. I was invited to apply to the ING Innovation Labs to explore opportunities in commercial real estate. The idea was to try and get innovators and banking professionals working together to examine the market and find potential startup ideas that the bank could support. For me it was the chance to improve my entrepreneurial skillset without the financial risks associated with starting another company.Our team fleshed out a promising idea, and I pitched it several times to senior management within the bank (we needed to get approval at several "stage gates" in the process to continue) and we got the green light to continue each time. However, our idea eventually ran out of steam when it became apparent that some of our assumptions – about access to proprietary data – weren't borne out, and as a team we made the collective decision not to take the idea any further.

After returning to the UK, I made the switch to consulting to allow me flexibility in my working hours so I could continue working on the side project I started in Hong Kong (that would eventually become Octavia).While working with Daiwa, I was given several large projects to design, architect and build:* Excel pricing & risk interface: using the expertise I gained building an Excel application for UBS, I designed an add-in (using ExcelDNA and C#), and suite of workbooks that enabled traders and middle office to view, edit and report on their trades, and define and schedule complex risk batches – crucially also allowing developers to build and test pricing code and risk definitions without having to go through Murex.* Ruby risk platform: a (pure Ruby) DSL/framework built on a (SWIG) Ruby/C++ interface to simplify – and encourage reuse of – specification of risk and stress scenarios.

Nomura bought the Hong Kong operations of Lehman Brothers, and a lot of the team in London (that didn't go over to Barclays Capital) joined Nomura in the UK too, so after the dust settled, an opportunity to return to the fold arose, and I took it.This was managing the Hong Kong component of a global team building and architecting a new credit derivatives trading and market data platform. We architected and built C# components to store and serve credit market data across the platform, and I regularly presented and demonstrated our plans and software to both technology and trading management.

After a mere fifteen interviews, I was able to leave on one of the last lifeboats leaving the good ship Lehman Brothers, and join UBS – leading a team in Hong Kong, managed from Tokyo, supporting a rates trading desk in Singapore.Day-to-day was a lot of Excel/VBA work, while managing several other strategic projects. To improve on the Excel/VBA, I built a C# addin as replacement for the main trading sheet logic, that became the primary trading sheet used for many of the emerging markets trading desks.

I usually like to be in a job for longer than 5 months, but circumstances in this case were somewhat beyond my control.I relocated to Hong Kong to lead the Structured Credit Analytics team; managing a team split between Hong Kong and Tokyo, working on the priorities of the local trading desk - who were performing very well (right up until December...). December 2008 coincided almost perfectly with my putting a deposit down on a two-year lease of a flat, so this was one of the more exciting conclusions to a role I've ever had.

Bored with the simplicity of exotic interest rate derivatives, and the short hours of development and support, I took the opportunity to move to Lehman Brothers and join the credit analytics team.I got to hone my C++ chops here, working closely with the quant team to integrate their models, support the risk batches, deal with queries from the traders and risk managers, as well as help architect a new system.Overnight support was part of the job, and it was painful. Nursing batches could take up most of the night, and involved logging into multiple machines to analyse logs, fix problems and recover batches. I am extremely lazy, and like sleep a lot, so I built a web interface for support, using an exciting new technology from Google called GWT that was definitely the future of the web. This tool displayed the progress of all of the batch jobs, aggregated logs, and allowed for batch recovery. Crucially, all this was doable with the mouse, so I could reach out of my bed to my desk, fix a problem and go back to sleep, all without actually getting out of bed. Later this meant we could outsource our first line support to a team in India, and we could all get more sleep.

After a stint in support, I got the chance to make the move of my dreams – over to the front office! Coding in C++! Working in exotic derivatives no less!It started out as mainly support again – only this time it was me waking up in the middle of the night to nurse a batch. I joined as the team both lost most of the people working on it, and had to roll out a critical model upgrade that would release a bunch of capital for the desk. Eventually though, that went out, the team expanded a bit, and I finally figured out what all of the weird greek-sounding things everyone was talking about meant, and got to work on some interesting C++ projects with an excellent team, and got my first taste of distributed computing as we migrated our batches over to a proper grid platform.

After being moved internally to the Windows Server Support team at Barclays Capital, I had the good fortune to be contacted by a recruiter who – through some strange twist of fate – wanted someone to join a graduate program at a different bank.This role was a great learning experience: London was a satellite office of the main derivatives technology HQ in Chicago, and I started out on application support. Anytime anything went wrong during the day, I had the unpleasant job of waking somebody up across the pond. This meant that I got very good at figuring out how to diagnose and fix problems on systems I knew very little about; on the rare occasion I had to wake somebody up, I'd at least done most of the triaging work for them, so it didn't sting so much.Alongside support I learned Perl and basic web development so I could build tools to automate most of the mundane support tasks - they ended up being used across the back office in multiple regions, which was my first (satisfying) experience of building and supporting my own products.

SQL. In the fixed income settlements system team, which managed at the time around a third of all the cash settlements within Barclays Capital. Charged initially with optimising queries that often took over 12 hours to complete (not when I'd finished with them though), and then given the ultimate responsibility of managing the database upgrade to Oracle 8i.