Equational

Electricity, magnetism and time are tightly intertwined. You can try to work separately with them but that will not give you the whole picture. While if you consider the dynamic relation between all three, you can do magical things. For example, you can “bounces” electrical energy back and forth into magnetic energy resulting in alternative current, which magically almost avoiding the need to actually carry “real current” (which is expensive). Or you can “juggle” these energies while moving forward, and thereby creating photons and light. In project management, tasks, resources and time are also tightly intertwined. You can try to work with them separately but again at risk of being inefficient.  It is a bit of a stretch to compare project management with electromagnetism, yet it is intuitively pleasing. In electromagnetism, work is created by “applying” electrical currents and magnetic fields on each other. In project management, work is creating by “applying” tasks and resource...

This blog post is about two basic requirements when asking developers to write a very fast algorithmic trading systems. Designing fast system seems initially an easy task. You hire developers that are in touch with the physical nature of computers and networks. And you ask them to write fast code. Nevertheless, there are difficulties. The first is that allocating and freeing dynamic memory slows you down, so ideally you want to do without dynamic memory. Yet developers usually have a hard time with this requirement. One reason that developers are insecure in doing this is that they have been brought up with languages that only work with dynamic memory. The other reason is exactly the language issue: modern languages do not make it easy to program without dynamic memory allocation. Therefore it is best to present this requirement differently, in a form that is much easier to swallow, which could be as follows: Make sure to preallocate your dynamic memory before activating your algos...