Well if you have been following my tweets recently, you will know that I have decided to move on to pastures new after nearly 3 years working for one of the largest financial services companies in the world. Having been off for a few days now I’ve had a chance to reflect on my experiences and what I have learned from it.

When I joined, I hoped that being at the technical sharp end of the high-pressure trading market would provide me with valuable experience. I wanted to learn what it took to build large scale, n-tiered, fault-tolerant and highly performant software. I thought I would be building software to strict specification and detailed designs as part of a water-tight software development methodology. I also was led to believe that I would be working with other teams, identifying common funtionality and building reusable services and common infrastructure. I also wanted to help in setting up an brand new technology centre. Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out as I had hoped. Read on to find out why. Continue reading →

Soon after graduating and starting work for my first IT company, I realised that we, as software developers, are typecast. Our future careers are defined by what language we use, development tools we are given, the software we develop and even the type of company we happen to work for. The next job will probably use the same sort of skills, and so on. Before you know it, years have passed and you are stuck in a rut using the same skills as when you started out. Continue reading →