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	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
2	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
3	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
4	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
5	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
6	Architectural Assumptions Most of the systems I've worked on in the recent past have been latency rather than throughput orientated. However my current project is definitely throughput focused and scales horizontally rather than vertically (this is a simplification but basically ...	24-Dec-2007
7	What is Significant? Recently I wrote a quick blog about taking metrics for optimisation. I suggested they should only be included if the improvement was significant, but how do you define significant? You may think that 'significant' is just a matter of opinion but it ...	15-Dec-2007
8	Metrics Please! Again it's time to get something off my chest... Twice in the last week my project has been bitten by the same, basic issue. The first problem was a memory leak in a small but important tool which was caused by introducing faulty caching to a lookup. ...	12-Dec-2007
9	Do you need to build it yourself? I've worked in many organisations and one thing that never ceases to amaze me is how often teams build unnecessary tools and frameworks. Yet again, I have to use a bespoke defect tracking system. This is the third one I've come across and none of them ...	12-Nov-2007
10	Reference Architectures Some major architectural decisions, for a reasonable sized project, will be made before the coding starts e.g. using an Enterprise Service Bus, data access methods, transaction handling etc. Your ability to achieve your non-functional requirements will ...	10-Oct-2007