Hey! If you haven’t guessed, my name’s Iain and welcome to my site!
If you’re after recent stuff I’ve been up to, you can either find it on this site or on the social media links on the left. My CV can be found here.
Backstory
I have always had a passion for technology and gaming, and while my parents hoped I would grow out of the latter I have instead embraced it wholeheartedly. I will be the first to admit that I am no longer at the peak of my twitch shooting reflex ability and I’m increasingly becoming ‘average’ at some games as I progress through my thirties, but I’ll certainly attempt to give you a run for your money!
I’m predominantly a PC user. I grew up along with an old Amstrad 64 PC that loaded in cassette tapes and taught the youngster in me patience. I spent countless weekends combing car-boot sales for second hand games for that thing. I then moved onto a Windows 3.1 machine that had lemmings and chess. My childhood friends got the consoles and pets that I wanted, so I just lived vicariously through them. It also encouraged us to go out quite a lot, and you know, use our ‘imagination’. Good times.
Growing up with technology and having a keen eye for logic kind of steered me towards programming. I never found it difficult and it is an amazing outlet for creativity that I just can’t express in some other mediums – hey, even in pictionary I take a logical approach to my drawing. I Choose the most associated colour and pick the aspect of the subject that has the highest connotations and draw that first, but yeah I’m just happy if I can colour within the lines.
Talking about being creative, there’s also my photography. The beauty of a photograph is that I don’t need to be able to translate my vision to the screen/paper using a pen or paint, I can just arrange the world how I want and start from there! I am lucky to have traveled quite a lot as a child with my parents. My parents liked taking photos along the way; my father wanted inspiration for his art, and my mother wanted documentation to prove she had visited that location. So, naturally I wanted in on the fun and got a cheap film camera from Boots along with a role of film. I think on average I would be happy with half the photos I took, and at that time I wasn’t fussy at all. Over the years my parents upgraded my camera until I finally got a job and bought myself the camera I use today!
Work
As a child I never wanted to work, but I just accepted it as one of those things you have to do. My main aim was to find a job that I would enjoy, because if I’m going to spend half my life at work, I’d better not hate it.
The secret, ladies and gentlemen, is that nearly all jobs aren’t 100% fun. Even jobs that you feel like “that would be my dream job” will have elements that suck. The trick is to find a job that had a decent ratio of good stuff to bad, while also paying enough money that you can enjoy the time you have outside of work. That last part is called work/life balance and it’s easier to ignore when you’re younger!
My first ever summer job was working for a payroll company at Pinewood Studios. I learnt some important lessons there. Firstly, certain child actors get paid way too much compared to what I earnt that summer. Secondly, monotonous jobs are not for me. If my brain is not being engaged I will get bored and mess up even the most menial of tasks.
After graduating Southampton University, my first real job was working at JP Morgan. My advice to anyone doing a degree is to do as many summer internships as you can. It is by far the easiest way to set yourself up for success later. If a company spends over a month investing in you, chances are they’ll want you back later to cash in on their investment. And what’s more you won’t be expected to know much when you apply because you’re still mid education! (Plus you can probably determine whether you like the company or not during that time.)
I did various things at JP Morgan, I started as a Quality Assurance tester for a team called FTS (Funds Transfer Service) that was running on architecture almost as old as me. This was basically a program that was written in Cobol and had been built upon so many times over decades that it required a team of experts that would determine if altering one part of the application would effect any other part of the application. Ouch.
I then moved onto developing an ETF trading platform in Java as part of JPM’s initiative to upgrade their mainframe systems to modern architecture. (ETFs or Exchange Traded Funds are basically like a basket of stocks or other financial instruments that you can buy shares in. Their value will fluctuate based on their contents.)
My next job was at IHS Markit, working on a product called Totem. They provide consensus pricing for OTC Derivatives. A derivative is pretty much a contract between two parties based on an underlying asset. For example I could have a forward contract to buy a metric ton of gold on the 1st of Jan. The contracts are being bought and sold OTC (over the counter) aka not through an exchange, so to know how much that contract is worth we have to compare it to other similar contracts. That’s where Totem comes in, all the big players provide their OTC Derivative data to Totem who anonymises it and provides the price data back to them so everyone stays roughly in line with everyone else.
And finally I started working for ICE Data Services on an internal product that ships data around within the company. It is now my task to optimise various components within this application to ensure everything works smoothly and more efficiently!
