The unwritten rules of yelling at technology people on trading floors circa 2008.

A thread. So I worked in technology and sat on a trading floor supporting equity and derivatives traders in the late 2000s.

It looked a lot like this:

A deep dive into one of the most under appreciated parts of the modern financial system:

FTP’ing files between financial institutions and their clients.

A thread. So your first question might be:

“Why are companies FTP’ing files around??“

This is a good question and we are going to zoom out a little and explain what kind of information firms are sending in the first place.

GitHub has a talk from 2013 where the Ops guy says:

"We don't have dashboards. If something goes wrong, the alerting system generates a chart showing the error, screenshots it and then drops it in the ops channel"

I think about this quote every time I see a dashboard.

https://twitter.com/skamille/status/1790561926910554492

This is the talk btw which is excellent:

How they used to trace money flows in criminal investigations in the 1980s

A thread. A couple years ago, I read this great book about a Jersey City narcotics officer.

He went under cover and was mostly arresting small time drug dealers.

Until one day he was able to catch a mid level cartel operator.

Convincing people to come work with you and your firm.

(Even if you work at a “meatgrinder” of a firm).

A thread. Background:

At a past job, I ended up doing “closing calls” to convince ambivalent candidates to join the firm.

This was made harder by the fact that this place was known for high turnover and a very stressful work culture (it did pay pretty well though).

“Shorthand phrases” that my wife and I use to describe common situations in our life.

OR

“I thought it was free tacos but it was actually a newel post”

A post. So first of all, what is a “shorthand phrase”?

Have you ever had a shared story with either a good friend or your spouse that you can recall just by saying a key phrase from it

Eg “oh, yeah, remember the ‘burnt octopus’ story??”

That’s a shorthand phrase.

How I ended up working in hedge funds.

OR

“I will accept EVERY recruiter LinkedIn request!”

A thread. I’ve been working on Finance Tech(FT) for about 15 years with the last 9 being focused on hedge funds and prop trading firms.

This story is how I went from “regular” FT (Eg banks and other small firms) to hedge funds.

A story about putting people in the right roles as told via CFOs using foul language.

A thread. At my first full time job after college, I worked at a small firm (20 ppl).

During one of the monthly company meetings, the CFO gets up and says:

A list of facts that I find interesting/surprising.

Will try to add a source link for each.

A thread. 1. In Europe, only around 15% of smokers ever develop lung cancer.

Originally read this in a book by Bill Bryson but confirmed here: canceraustralia.gov.au/resources/posi…

Social Engineering a small town

OR

“I’m Alex Elliott.”

A thread. In my younger days, I was the General Manager of a “traveling” professional paintball league.

If you have no idea what that means, think of a traveling circus.

Running a #restaurant Italian style vs American style.

OR

“I could run this whole place with 4 people”

A thread. Think about your most recent experience at a restaurant in America:

Your waiter:
- took your order
- brought your drinks
- brought your food
- maybe even bussed your table
- brought you the check

This is, as always, an excellent article from @danluu

Never done this before but wanted to share some of my thoughts on the article.

(will write it over time instead of all at once)

https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1503512394126938120

@danluu The first thing that came to mind is one of Dan's old posts about "the best part of Hacker News being the comments" (see below for reference):

danluu.com/hn-comments/

Managing your time in high performant organizations.

OR

"Does your spouse log on to work after the kids go to bed?"

A thread. Unlike some of my other threads, this will be:
- A little more unstructured
- Written over time (usually I write the threads as a draft and release it all at once)

A curated list of some of my favorite quotes.

Sometimes with attribution and sometimes without.

A thread. On growing up: “At 16 I thought my father was the dumbest man alive. At 21 I couldn’t believe how much wisdom he acquired in 5 short years.” -Mark Twain

After almost 15 years of working in technology as an SRE (before it was even called that), here is a list of things that I wish I had at every firm I’ve worked at.

OR

How to be the best tech firm you can be.

A thread. 1. If you have a system that used complicated logic to route/classify/process information, spend the extra day or two at design time to have it output in PLAIN ENGLISH what happened for a given transaction.

https://twitter.com/alexpotato/status/1220576811190575104

A tale of of the benefits of aligned incentives

aka

"Teaching people to play paintball by taking away their guns.

A thread. Many years ago, I used to coach college paintball.

If you have no idea what college paintball is, below is a thread I previously put together which you might want to read before you continue.

https://twitter.com/alexpotato/status/1219998518489878530

How to do a "make vs buy" decision when you have zero data.

aka "What running professional paintball tournaments at Disney World taught me".

A thread. So back in the mid 2000's, I was the General Manager for a professional paintball league called Paintball Sports Promotions (PSP).

To give people a sense of scale, here is a picture of our biggest event in 2006, the World Cup:

A story of corporate bureaucracy hacking, programming, automation and depth first search optimization algorithms.

A thread. At a previous job, everyone was required to track the amount of time they spent on different projects. This is a pretty standard thing but, of course, at this place it was harder than it needed to be.

How to build an army of top quality people via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Yes, you read correctly, Mechanical Turk (henceforth referred to as MT).

A thread. Most people think of MT as "that thing Amazon offers where you have a lot of work that you need humans to do where you pay per task and it works out to be below min wage".

Because they have that mental model they automatically equate MT to "low quality" which is wrong...

Back in the early 2000's, I worked for a firm that was responsible for investigating TV Smart Card hacking for a major satellite provider.

Here are some of the highlights of how we tracked and caught some of the hackers.

A thread. So for those of you not familiar with how satellite TV worked back then here is some background.

- The provider would "beam" a stream of data (e.g. TV channels etc) from a ground station up to a geosynchronous satellite
- Geosynch was important as you target a country/region

So wanted to do a thread on using #bash on the #linux #cli .

Bash often gets ignored in today's cloud centric world but there is a lot of cool stuff you can do just with basic commands, the switches on those commands and piping things together.

To the command line! So I'm going to start out with some of the more basic commands and some switches that people aren't familiar with and then rapidly get more advanced in both usage and stringing commands together.

Never done this on Twitter before so should be exciting!