Programming braindump : Week 09/02/2015

The Braindump

• I went to a great event organized by Women in Data and Pyladies London. The evening was sponsored by Man group’s AHL fund and included talks by AHL quant developers and quant analysts. All in all, it was a great evening and I am now quite fascinated about the hedge fund world and in particular, the software development that goes into making pricing models.

• At work, I am working on improving a source-to-source compiler, which transforms Java code into C# and JavaScript code. Needless to say, I am learning a whole lot about compilers, Abstract Syntax Trees and and about the JVM. There might be a blog post in the near future about compilers - they are truly fascinating!

• I have been reading Cal Newport’s blog. I first came across Newport’s writings in college and was quite taken with his debunking of the “follow your passion” -thesis for career success. Although I read his advice on being successful at college, various issues in my personal life got in the way of implementing these strategies. I’d like to these strategies another try.

• I started working on a data simulation project related to the London underground. Hopefully, I will be able to give an update post soon.

• I finally started using Pycharm and I can say that my Python programming productivity has increased. On the other hand, people say that IDEs make a developer stupid. So I’ll have to keep close tabs on the situation and maybe bust out good old vim once in a while (vim is great, by the way, but for TDD I find an IDE to be easier)

On-going programming reading list

• Learning Python by Mark Lutz: Still working through part IV: Functions and Generators. Hopefully, will finish it in the coming week

• Bokeh tutorial (needed for my London Underground programming project)

• graph_tool tutorial (needed for my London Underground programming project)