Robert Annett

Robert works in financial services and has spent many years creating and maintaining trading systems. He knows far too much about low latency data systems and garbage collection than is good for anyone. If you find yourself in a pub with him then do NOT mention phrases like "mark and sweep" or "memory profiling" as you'll be stuck there for hours and, might, be forced to break an ashtray over your own head to get away from him.

When not pouring over data connections or tormenting interviewees with circular reference questions, Robert can be found locked in his shed with an impressive collection of woodworking tools.

E-mail : robert.annett at codingthearchitecture.com

Recent Blog Entries
1	Features vs Behaviour I've recently had a bug I raised with a third party software supplier downgraded from high to low importance. No one likes having their bugs downgraded (it probably shows you what a nerd I am by taking this personally) but what surprised me was the ...	25-Nov-2011
2	Is caching an 'Architectural Smell'? Kent Beck introduced the concept of "Code Smells" while working on Martin Fowler's famous Refactoring book and I think that most people would agree with many of the stinks he identified. Many of us probably also use tools such as checkstyle to ...	02-Oct-2011
3	Jitter On CTA we often talk about non-functional requirements and how this can drive the architecture of a system. Most of these cover issues of desired response time and capacity (latency, throughput, storage etc) but I believe that Jitter is a metric which is ...	06-Sep-2011
4	Data Integrity and System Design Having been involved in several upgrade projects over the last few years, one thing I've often noticed is the poor quality of data that can be present in a large and long running system. This can present problems for upgrading and usually means that you ...	15-Apr-2011
5	Maintainable Systems 2 A little while ago I wrote a piece about maintainable systems and upgrades. My own upgrade project has been progressing slowly and I'm going to write a few more thoughts. A successful system might (hopefully) be around for many years. It's highly likely ...	29-Sep-2010
6	Fail Safe One of the most misunderstood engineering terms is 'fail safe'. Most people from a non-engineering background (including many software developers) believe it means something won't fail. Last week even the Economist used it incorrectly. A 'fail safe' ...	23-Mar-2010
7	Designing Maintainable Systems I'm currently involved in a project to upgrade a third party piece of software and it's apparent that when the software was originally designed, the upgrade process was not considered. This became obvious when we totaled up the time required to perform, ...	29-Jan-2010
8	Modifying Open Services There's been a huge push recently towards service oriented architectures - sharing services within an organisation with benefits such as reuse and making information consistent. Take a simple example such as a catalogue of products for a furniture ...	14-Nov-2008
9	Project Naming Whenever I've started work on a new project I've had an introduction along these lines: Wizard feeds into Pluto, which then re-values. It broadcasts changes that are picked up by Puma and recorded by Halo. but what they really mean is something like: ...	01-Mar-2008
10	System Design and Reconciliation Even those not working in Finance have probably heard about the intriguing events in a large investment bank and the HUGE losses that have occurred. The interesting comment from an IT and architecture point of view is the following: The trader ...	08-Feb-2008