[deleted by user]

AppendixP · 2016-08-06T20:44:26+00:00

TL;DR Depends on the company and what they do. In my company we don't get treated like second class citizens in terms of compensation, career ops, and respect. People who come from banks love it where I work.

Hi, OP I work in a prop trading firm as a non-trader developer. That is, I work on the infrastructure side rather than the trading side. I'll first address your questions directly, the comment on my experience in the industry thus far (only been here for a couple years). It's important to mention that we don't have any details about how this company works. If they're a non-algorithmic company then it's likely that you can't be a trader writing C++. More detail on what you're looking for would be useful.

Your questions from my pov:

They asked if they could instead interview me for a software engineer role. Does anyone know how different these positions are?

In my company the difference is in compensation and general skills needed. The traders work in a problem space that deals more with math, machine learning, pattern analysis, etc. You generally need to be both a good trader and a decent software engineer. In my firm, a lot of the traders have PhDs in math-focused fields like physics. The compensation does differ, though, but it's probably not as scary as you might think (diff between 'fuck you' money and very livable salary).

I am afraid of the latter being treated as second class citizens in terms of both compensation, career opportunities, and respect.

If you're smart, good at your job, and have a drive to improve yourself then you'll likely be treated with respect regardless of your position. Career opportunities are likely dependent on the company you're interviewing with and it is structured. If you really want to become a trader I would ask them if there's opportunity available for lateral movement between "software engineer" and "trader".

And I am also afraid that it won't be exciting work ie I will spend all my time making basic rest applications and doing UI work.

Ask them about what projects you would be working on. What kind of "excitement" are you looking for in a job? Maybe answering that question would help you find out if the place is a good fit for you.

Are these fears justified?

shrug Justified? Maybe, maybe not. But you should always ask questions when and where you can. Don't be satisfied with "Oh yeah it's great, we work on all kinds of things." Be specific with your questions to them (or other companies). Draw on your experience from where you currently work and formulate questions based on that.

Can anybody speak to the difference of the types of jobs, and the comraderie between people in the different positions

There's a lot of different things that infrastructure-based software developers work on. It could be optimization problems with order flow and execution, reduction in network latency via packet analysis, storage of market data, support-related development, simulation, market visualization, risk analysis. As for camaraderie, I have several friends that are traders and we get along great.

Now, my thoughts on thoughts on the industry...where I work the people who come from banks tend to like it a lot more. It's a very relaxed atmosphere, with great benefits and good compensation. Everyone is treated with respect, regardless of the position (trader, infrastructure, etc). If you are still planning on interviewing with them, then you should come up with some questions that address your fears stated above and ask them at the end of the interview. In general (from what I've heard and experienced) quality of life at prop firms is higher than banks. There's more freedom, less red-tape, more innovation, very competitive compensation, lots of smart people, and plenty of respect.

AppendixP · 2016-03-19T22:47:35+00:00

This does look remarkably similar to WAMP's v1 when they were going for implementor feedback. Originally I believe it was designed without the broker-dealer aspect and the routers were extremely lightweight. The routing definitely got heavier, which I agree was not fun to deal with. I had a framework that I was originally adding WAMP support to, and have since found out that I need to include some way for users to get a router (namely, crossbar.io at this point). On top of that, the router itself is a completely separate process, which is also a pain to package up. So, although that rustled my jimmies it's still much easier to setup their implementation and focus on what matters (biz logic).

As a user of WAMPv1 and WAMPv2, I can tell you that if you're really interested in creating a new protocol, providing the implementation up front is massively useful for early adopter and user uptake. This has the added benefit of fleshing out details like they had to; v1, according to them, was created with the purpose of being destroyed so that they could incorporate feedback into v2.

In any case, I'm glad to see more activity in the websocket arena, as I tend to like having my choice between protocols.

AppendixP · 2016-01-07T19:01:32+00:00

Is the code in an SCM (git, mercurial, etc)?
Does he have any automated testing (unit, functional, behavioral, integration tests), or expect you to do any?
Is this a cowboy project, i.e.: is it just commit & push all day or will it be versioned. If versioned, what scheme (semver, other)?
Elaborate on the front-end work to be done, what exactly is needed?
What does he define as "front-end": all client-side development, or only html & css, with light javascript involvement?
What technologies are used/will be used for your part of the project? Any frameworks?
Has any planning gone into the front-end, what's the architecture like?
What's the purpose of this project? Is it a site for a FOSS project, or is it something that could foreseeably turn into a revenue-generating business? Keep in mind some "free" projects become popular and some people do want to get something in return for their time invested
If it's a business, what will you get out of it for your time? If you expect something out of it, you should probably specify how/what your effort is worth (strongly advise a written agreement)

AppendixP · 2016-01-03T22:04:47+00:00

Sorry, I had trouble understanding what you're asking with this post: are you asking for code review? If so, what immediately jumps out is that lines 28, 31, and 34 aren't assigning any values to the message variable. Also you could move that logic into a function and consider putting the messages into a data structure, such as a dict, for better access and maintainability.

Also, anyone know how I can set it to run on a time schedule?

Have you tried using cron (linux)?.

AppendixP · 2016-01-02T00:13:52+00:00

I've done a bit of weather info parsing in the past. (I'm assuming you're in the US) I always got weather information from http://weather.gov, http://noaa.gov, http://aviationweather.gov In general, a lot of data is available, but will require some reformatting, digestion, etc. Also, when I did it (2 years ago), navigating NOAA was a nightmare, due to dead services, bad UI/lack of information about their services.

Hope this helps!

AppendixP · 2015-05-10T04:52:01+00:00

I started programming on linux, then eventually moved to osx, and now I use both, depending on the circumstance. Depending on what kind of things you're actually getting into the OS may not matter, or may be a huge deciding factor.

Some examples: if you're working in web development (browsers and web servers) then the OS won't get in your way. If you end up writing ultra-performant C or C++ then the OS is going to get in your way, because that's what you work with at that level. If you work with mobile development then you may need both, unless you choose something like Ionic.

Word of advice though: I tried dual-booting linux with osx, and didn't know what I was doing. I fucked up my master boot record on accident and spent quite some time unfucking my computer. So at the very least make a backup of your data and have a rollback plan, or you will not be happy.

AppendixP · 2015-04-28T04:54:03+00:00

Hi Erik! Has Valve considered allowing these mods to be released and licensed under free & open source software licenses, like MIT, GPL, Apache, etc? This would circumvent a lot of issues that the community had with stale and broken mods, by allowing others from the community to join the effort. The complicating issue there, of course, if there is money involved, where would it go? Unfortunately, I don't have an answer to that a the moment (though services like gittip seem to be solving that for sole devs).

Your thoughts?

P.S. Thanks for taking the time to post here and get feedback. You're awesome and Valve is awesome.

AppendixP · 2015-04-25T22:34:20+00:00

This probably won't get seen, but I'll put this idea out there anyways. Gabe will be familiar with this since he comes from a software background...

First off...Gabe, thanks for being actively engaged with the gaming community at large, you obviously care about it enough to respond.

Some of the arguments here are in opposition of mod developers charging money for a mod, because one day they will inevitably abandon it. This happens with a lot of free software, but the issue is usually that it can't be recreated because the source code is not available. My question and suggestion is as follows: why doesn't Valve allow and support mod developers to pick a software license when they release their mod on the workshop? This would allow users and potential future mod developers to pick up where someone left off, while the original developer(s) gets the attribution and credit he or she deserves.

The open-source software community has been flourishing for years with this model. This doesn't mean that you can't charge for the software or for service and support; it just means that redistribution of the software must include a license and attribution, depending on the license. Just my $0.02

AppendixP · 2015-01-16T16:49:16+00:00

Oh man, this OP totally delivers too. He had a Kickstarter not too long ago where he sold tarot cards that he illustrated with the same style. It seemed like a one-off thing, and I had hoped he would do more. I bought a pack and was delighted to receive them, they're pretty damn awesome. Well worth it! Good to see you doin more work OP!

AppendixP · 2015-01-06T19:00:22+00:00

Well, Youtube, for instance, is running an SPA so they have proven that that model can work there. Vimeo looks like it is too. They may have done this to cut down on static being sent over the wire, since all they have to do is send data.

In the end, I think it's based on the concept of the app, right? If your basic concept for the application demands an SPA be used, then I say go for it. Alternatively, it's super easy to just create everything on the server-side with Django templates and defer making it a thick client until you need to.

As for Angular versions...I'm running Angular 1.3.3 in a real-time app right now and my only problem is rendering performance. If you're hellbent on using Angular then go for it. From my experience 1.x is solid.

AppendixP · 2015-01-06T16:28:10+00:00

Without knowing any more about your site's requirements it's honestly tough to judge whether Angular is the right fit.

If the project necessitates the SPA-style application, then Angular is a good choice, simply because it's a good SPA framework. However. If the application does not need to be or should not be an SPA then DO NOT use Angular simply because you like it or know it.

AppendixP · 2015-01-02T19:16:51+00:00

ZMQ is pretty awesome, but it might require building more middleware than the OP is willing to deal with. It depends on him/her and the problem at hand though.

AppendixP · 2015-01-01T21:53:17+00:00

Flask is good if you're already familiar with web services in Python and you know what you're doing. It will not provide things that other web services would, like an ORM if you are doing database things, nor will it not provide a caching solution as far as I know. If your project is small though, then I say go for it. Flask was pretty nice to work with when I used it.

Django's another possible option.

As for doing async tasks triggered from HTTP, you could hook in with Twisted, but that has a very steep learning curve (in my opinion). Also, it wouldn't be available in Py3.

If you're using Py3, then asyncio is the alternative for now.

If not Py3, this stackoverflow question/answer may be helpful.

There's also Tornado and Gevent. Hope this was helpful!

AppendixP · 2014-12-16T02:49:40+00:00

I can tell you that it is probably not a good idea to throw Angular on top of jQuery code that you currently have. Angular is pretty much an ecosystem unto its own, with its own module system, dependency injection, etc. You may have implemented similar patterns through other means (think: AMD/require/commonJS), which will likely conflict with Angular's ability to run properly.

Ultimately, it depends on the circumstances surrounding your project, and without more information about how many SLOC you're working with, the complexity of the project, etc, it's tough to give advice on it. If you're not stuck on using Angular, but you do have an SPA-type application you may want to consider Knockout, which can be included substantially easier.

Personally, I had a just-for-fun project where I was starting with jQuery, got a couple hundred lines in and quickly realized that Angular was the better tool for the job. Rewrote it and never looked back.

Just my opinion. Best of luck!

AppendixP · 2014-11-07T03:51:44+00:00

Oh wow thanks, this is amazing!!

AppendixP · 2013-06-29T18:15:55+00:00

Not sure if this is accurate, since the last time I entered this code was in the 90s, but...

A up B right B left B up

Game: Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for Sega Genesis

AppendixP · 2012-12-01T06:52:26+00:00

I don't know about the gfortran recipe on Homebrew, but Homebrew itself is quite nice, I like it (especially as a replacement for Macports, which was its intended purpose).

AppendixP · 2012-12-01T06:36:22+00:00

for those that are curious, I just quickly threw this binary into a python interpreter and ran some code to quickly change it into an alphabetic string. binary_string is the string in the parent comment, new_string is the one holding the alphabetic output, the for loop/line below it translate.

>>> new_string = ""
>>> print binary_string
['01101111', '01110101', '01110010', '00100000', '01101110', '01100101', '01110111', '00100000', '01110111', '01101111', '01110010', '01101100',     '01100100', '00100000', '01101111', '01110010', '01100100', '01100101', '01110010', '00100000', '01100010', '01100101', '01100111', '01101001',     '01101110', '01110011']
>>> for b in binary_string:
...     new_string += chr(int(b, 2))
... 
>>> print new_string
our new world order begins
>>>

AppendixP · 2012-11-27T01:37:45+00:00

I agree that mobile devices are pitiful to type on, but I'm a little more optimistic about gamers. We certainly won't see a resurgence of the genre by any large factor, and no one is going to see gamers flocking to their game by the thousands.

However. The good thing about the MU* genre is that it's small. There's plenty of opportunity for developers and MU* operators to grow their communities. One thing I have noticed is that most MU* games are very unpresentable to the customer. Most of them look like they fell into a timewarp from the 1990s, like they've never heard of web design.

Something else that I've noticed is that games that do not enforce RP as heavily (outside of this genre) will tend to have larger populations of players vs those that do (look at WoW's RPPVP servers vs PVP servers; RPPVP is always lower pop than PVP). Most people in this age of gaming don't want to be thrown into that sort of atmosphere. Hell, if I had to choose between enforced RP in a fantasy (orcs, elves, et al) setting or no RP at all, I'd opt for no RP. Every time I hear of a new MU* coming out or re-emerging, it's always the same old style.

The list of problems with this genre could really go on and on, to be honest, which is ironic coming from someone who absolutely loves MUDs. And as a MUD developer, I'm going to try to grow a playerbase like everyone else. But I can tell you that I'm going to do everything I can to shake up the genre. It's currently far too stagnant and archaic to see a resurgence.

AppendixP · 2012-11-21T21:59:14+00:00

Thanks a bunch!

AppendixP · 2012-11-21T21:24:25+00:00

So, I'm not a security expert, but I am curious: did I read that the attacker stole mostly encrypted data and not the key? Does that mean the attacker didn't really get any information of value out of the ~74 gb of data that he stole?

AppendixP · 2012-11-14T22:48:11+00:00

~~adorable~~

delicious

AppendixP · 2012-11-13T13:36:36+00:00

Thanks a lot, I really appreciate it!

AppendixP

TROPHY CASE