The Cinnober Blog

Running The Marathon

Veronica Augustsson — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:58:54 +0200

Not a story about any marathon. A story about The Marathon.

How can a marathon be compared to something that we do at Cinnober? It depends how you see it. I think running a marathon is like launching a product without acceptance test, without testing in production environment and barely without have run a full capacity test.

So, who can be that stupid that you expose your self for something like that? I was. And the other 8399 first Stockholm Marathon runners earlier this month. I mean, the other 10000 know what they were getting in to on for hand.

It all started in September when I wanted to have a new goal with my training. Pär Bertilsson and I walked down the stairs at our former premises at Industrigatan, checking out for the weekend when Pär was asking what I was training for. I answered “I think I’m going to run Stockholm Marathon”. To be honest, I think I was more surprised by the answer than Pär was. Said and done I headed home, started my computer and spent 2 hours surfing among Marathon Training Programs. The longest I run so far was half a marathon. But a marathon felt doable so I signed up. I also sent an email to my family and friends telling that May 31 2008 I was going to run my first Stockholm Marathon. Perfect. Just making sure there is no way of regretting.

36 weeks to go. Late September. I started to train immediately. It was so fun! After running two half marathons this was just what I needed.

22 weeks to go. December. No snow. The perfect marathon winter! The official marathon training program starts.

15 weeks to go. February, just 2 degrees, rain. The first proof of concept, 25+ km. Besides that I could not speak the last 10 km since my mouth was so frozen, it went well! Feeling confident!

4 weeks to go. There has been around 7 or 8 pass around 27-30 km. Here comes the one and only longest lap before the race. 33 km. It is the warmest weather of the year. 26 degrease. I’m running out of water. Thirsty with 7 more km to go. 4 more km, stopping at a gas station to refill my water bottles. Can’t barely run the last km. Anyway, I wasn’t that worried for the race. I had after all run totally 81 km this week.

1 week to go. The big day is coming up. Almost only rest on the schedule this week. Feeling unreal. All training since September just focusing on May 31.

On the starting line. I can’t remember that I had any feelings at all

10 km. I’m flying

26 km. Just heading in to Strandvägen from Djurgården. Soo beautiful!

30 km. I promise you that every new generation, old generation and young generation of my muscle cells was just full of garbage. Is there a way of triggering a human garbage collection, please let me know

30-40 km. Has 10 km ever been this far?

40 km. Seeing Stockholm Stadion. (Probably dreaming since you can’t see it from here) Getting new energy and increasing the speed.

41950 m. Entering Stockholm Stadion. Almost double the speed (it feels like anyway). I’ll never forget this moment. The grandstand is crowded with people watching me crossing the finishing line. Or did they? I don’t care. Crossing that line was such a relief. But at the same time sad. Now it’s over. Time to find new goals to over come.

Having said that, I can guarantee you that I will do everything I can be as prepared as possible to any production launch! Not knowing if the capacity is enough or not knowing if the hardware is ideal is not something that you want to be part of when the whole company’s reputation is at stake. Or even worse, our customer’s reputation.

The best thing is that I’m not the only one at Cinnober that has run The Marathon. We are many strugglers. And I’m sure there are more to come. Isn’t there J-O?

Hot in Sweden

Fredrik Backlund — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:54:47 +0200

What is it that has made Stockholm, far up in the cold North, to such a hub for global financial technology? A couple of business media have asked this question lately.

Some says the explanation is within the “technology tradition” of Sweden combined with the fact that a small domestic market drives internationalization. Some says that a great deal stems from the early initiative of the legendary Olof Stenhammar”.

The answer might lie here and also in the phenomena clustering…?

However, even the Swedes seem a bit surprised over the number of financial tech companies that successfully have expanded during recent years. This week, the leading Scandinavian business magazine Affärsvärlden published an extensive focus on this sector.

Cinnober, chosen by BOAT, Turquoise and Alpha Trading Systems, is of course covered. Also business peers in the actual physical neighborhood such as ORC, Neonet, Tbricks and… well, okay… even also a few words regarding that “US owned exchange” located in the rougher harbor area of Stockholm…

One morning the magazine actually succeeded to assemble some of the joined forces for a photo session. Some CEOs and founders were able to participate on short notice. Usual spokespersons on our hand such as Jan and Nils-Robert were of course on various flights. Not exactly a PR officer’s dream…

Cinnober was represented in the photo session by two of the founders; Gunnar Mjöberg and Peter Lenti – still active within the day-to-day business and development.

I wonder if Gunnar and Peter were too impressed over the idea of the appearance within a glossy business magazine – they might have preferred a techie magazine within the Java community or so? But they didn’t have such a choice while being hunted down by colleagues with a special interest within “Corporate Communications”. ‘Cause it’s great with great publicity! ; – )

Some reflections from JavaOne in San Francisco

Kalle Hassel — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:02:58 +0200

I really love San Francisco with the cable cars, Lombard Street, Golden gate, Victorian houses. If you think that I experienced all these things… Wrong! I joined the JavaOne conference…

Some weeks before, I booked my sessions etc. The choice was simple, focus on technology for the financial market.

My schedule got full of sessions with Real-time Java, Garbage Collection, Concurrency, Throughput & Latency, and the new GC type G1. Yes, I am into Java…

When I reached SF I felt like being in a movie, everything were new but yet so familiar…

Well, 15,000 Java developers joined the conference at Moscone Center. When I reached the conference area I first reached the north building where the large session was held.
But all people were stopped at the entrance by a conference guard, we were not allowed to just go the stairs down to the session hall, but we saw people being downstairs, weird! Why?

“You have to go to the other side of the street, to the south building, there is a way to the session hall under the street”. It was no idea arguing, because I heard several now irritated Java developers arguing the same way I intended…

I walked across the Folsom street to the south building, but I was confused, a lot of people stood in front of some other guards saying things like what I had just heard. – “You have to go to the other side, go to the north building”…

After a while I decided to give it another try, I walked across the street again, together with hundreds of people. I heard the same arguing again from Java developers but now new people, perhaps newly arrived, I saw them turn around and walk across the street, I smiled for myself and thought good luck…Anyway, I came to the large session hall just in time.

Some highlights from JavaOne, theme JAVA + YOU:

JavaFX, has been more developed. A demo gave an overall cool impression; dragging a running application from a browser onto the desktop, closing the browser and the app continues running just like that.

Rock’n‘Roll; Neil Young showed up on the first keynote giving credit to Java and Blue Ray.

G1, Sun develops a future replacement of GC type CMS. The new G1 will focus on low latency but still good throughput.

Real-time Java. There exist RTJVM from Sun, IBM and JRockit today. The JSR work is still ongoing. Soon new updated VMs will be released.

Java1.7. Some news are: Multi-catch, enhancements of Annotations, closures, fork/join framework and a transfer queue.

JMARS; NASA has produced a very impressive tool for mapping Mars and handling various geological data. The amazing application showing Mars’ elevation, potential landing sites, and a large amount of surface detail shots.

The sessions were held on a rather high level. I had to talk to the speakers, join the BOFs to get answers to the specific questions our company had. I visited some company booth and some companies presented performance analysis tools for production, that should not slow latency at all, maybe some milliseconds, they told me. When I said that decrease of latency for only 1 ms in our system is bad, they looked like they had got something stuck in their throat…and it was time for me to walk on.

The computer revolution is here, we already did the 0->1 CPU transition. Concurrent programming is now “the norm”, many companies are doing the 1->2 CPU transition. Scalable concurrent programming is even harder. It is time to think about the 2->N CPU transition. There is one interesting query we could try to answer: What is the limit of parallelism of our trading system?

In the future I believe Cinnober have to adopt to the new memory models, immortal memory and scoped memory using Real-time Java using NHRT and Javolution to decrease the latency.

One conclusion of all my inputs I got from JavaOne is very satisfying:
Cinnober already have relationship with a number of the speakers and we cover the new technology. We either have ongoing research or we already know the new technology well. I feel that we are well-equipped for future competition.

And, there is no doubt about it, I will for sure go back to experience the amazing Bay area again.

“I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.”

Arthur Hays Sulzberger

But at least I have one photo of SF with me back home, I took a shot on a postcard…

Photo of a postcard

Thoughts from inside a developer’s head

Veronica Augustsson — Wed, 28 May 2008 10:30:05 +0200

Being a developer is exciting in many ways. Being a developer at a company that is using the technology to its extreme is even more exciting. If you then have the privilege to be a developer on a project that is developing a product that will be a pioneer in the European financial market, it is hard not to love your job! Wake up smiling every Monday morning.

What is it that I like with being a developer? I can only speak for myself – well, it might be that I can also speak for my sister (she works for Cinnober, too), since we usually like the same things – and here I will try to describe what it is that I like.

I like being part of and have an understanding of the whole chain of events. I like to understand. Understand that if I implement this requirement or use case, what does our customer gain? And more importantly, what does our customer’s customer gain? What impact does this implementation have on other components in the system? Is the performance affected? Is it compatible with the prior release?

It’s almost that I’m ashamed to tell you, but one thing that I really like is when there is a seriously and tricky problem to solve. It is not that I want to have seriously tricky problems. But if we do, I’ll like to be part of the team that solves it. It’s something with the adrenaline that I like. To stay calm. Understand the problem. Identify the potential areas where the problem lies. Communicate with the customer. Narrowing the potential areas. Finding the root cause. Reproduce the problem. Find a work around. Find a solution.

I spent one year of my life collecting experiences from operations and the trading floor at one of our customers. The option system that we have delivered to them is integrated in a fairly complex environment. Once there was a problem with surrounding systems that affected the option trading in a negative way. To clarify; options couldn’t be traded. Traders surrounded the Service Desk. Managers, vice presidents, presidents and the CTO were all coming to the Service Desk. The higher they screamed the higher position they had. (Showing power to act…) To be there, in the middle of maybe 100 persons, answering questions on how the system behaves was remarkable. (Ok, I was kind of nervous at the time, but now a couple of years later I would rather describe it as remarkable). Knowing that the traders were losing money. Knowing that the exchange was losing credibility. Knowing that the traders didn’t care where the problem was. They couldn’t trade options. Which meant that Cinnober could also lose credibility. But we could also gain credibility if we helped solve a problem that had its root cause outside our area of responsibility. Answering a question by saying “I don’t know” was not an option. Answering a critical question with an incorrect answer was almost equal to suicide. Not only was the answer supposed to be correct, it was also supposed to be politically correct. And instantly.

Maybe you are wondering why I don’t do support if I like it so much. I think I like it that much just because I am a developer. In those critical moments you need to know the code. The connections. The whole system. The customer’s business. The details.

But there is no doubt about it – I just loved being onsite. I never felt so alive.

From the desk of Jan

Jan Arpi_CEO — Mon, 19 May 2008 09:29:02 +0200

Summer is rapidly approaching, also here far up in the north of Europe. By this we also get the upside of living here coping with the long dark winter. The days are getting longer and longer and we can enyoy the white Scandinavian light. If you can find a reason to visit us during the summer please drop us a line and we promise to take good care of you…

Business-wise this is a very hectic period for Cinnober. We have passed the peak in the both delivery projects to Turquoise and Apha Trading Systems and are in line with the time plans for both projects.
However there is still a lot of work to do with integration and testing.

It is also looking very positive for Cinnober for the fall of 2008 and onwards, as we get a lot of enquiries concerning TRADExpress and challenges over what we can do. With our new version of TRADExpress to be in production September 2008, we are in good shape (If you are thinking of investing in this area, do not do it until you have checked this baby out….)

There are also a number of other activities going on with our other customers, e.g. Quadriserv in NY and London Metal Exchange. More to be told about them later.

I am also happy to say that I end of last week were able to finalize some key recruitments, e.g. a new HR Manager. Warmest welcome onboard !

Another positive thing was that we were mentioned in a Canadian Business TV channel, BNN, which made a story about our customer Alpha Trading Systems in Toronto, who are planning to launch their market offering in September, 2008.

Especially I liked the quote “….their technology is some of the best in the world…” from one of Alpha’s potential customers. If you would like to see the excerpt please see the link http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip52738 (to view the Alpha sequence, please skip to 40:05).

Time to get busy again, keep in touch!

Trade Tech from within

Mons Johansson — Mon, 05 May 2008 09:39:54 +0200

Mons Johansson, Sales Executive, Cinnober, giving you some inside on the recent Trade Tech exhibition…

Being rather new at Cinnober, it was an exciting task to head up our booth at Trade Tech. We realized that we got a pretty good spot when Nils-Robert, Peter, Johan and myself came crashing in with our stuff.

The truth was that I was actually entrusted to catch the red eye flight to lay out the “administrative platform” for our booth. Is it always so when you are new on-board you get these “missions of honor”?

This happened in La Défence, which is the Canary Wharf of Paris, very impressive. Well inside, building the booth, it was a well organized chaos. I seemed to be the only one “do it yourself” man tearing up the content of our bags, trying to make the most of our scarce space. Everyone else seemed be using trained professionals for this task, but if you are careful with our (and in the end also our customers) funds, you do it yourself…

Talking about suffering, I can also admit being unprofessional, bringing new shoes. This was not a problem until I hit the end of Champs Elysés and had to figure out a way to get back to La Défence…

First day: In early with Peter K. Setting up the last, just finding out that the lights were the US-version, only 110 Volts, which gives a rather foggy atmosphere… Anyway, the content is actually the most important. A lucky circumstance was that we sat next to Nomura, who offered the most delicious sushi, Asahi beer and Ben & Jerry’s, all traditional Japanese cuisine (?).We had our traditional Swedish chocolate which also had a striking sell…

I was happy to see a good show with quite many visitors, well qualified as well as qualified exhibitors.

We got a lot of interesting traffic talking about our high profile technology delivery to Turquoise in London. There were also some interesting discussions about our in-depth study about the issues of low latency/throughput and how this is measured in a truthful way.

Thank you all for participating and hope to see you all again soon!
// Mons

Proudly presenting the Cinnober Blog

Jan Arpi_CEO — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:39:52 +0200

In this blog, we here at Cinnober will share our views with you about being in the financial marketplace technology business.

Today I am proud to announce that we have simultaneously launched our new web site and our new graphical identity.

It is actually more than just a new web, it is a new way of expressing ourselves. A bit more playful and flexible, with many opportunities to seek information – just like we want to be when working with you.

We also want to emphasize our “passion for change”. By this we mean that we are passionate about working with you, seizing opportunities and turning change into a competitive advantage, whenever change is occurring.

This is what we have done during our first 10 years of existence, what we still do today and what we will focus on even more as the stakes get higher, as technology develops, as rules are changing.

Some people have told us that we are not very much of marketing guys. Sometimes when we meet new prospective customers there is an interesting discussion. A typical quote can be: “Wow, I had no idea that you could do all this. If the world knew, you would be drowned with propositions. How come you don’t tell them…?”

So, I hope this can be the first step in being more communicative and try to tell the world a little bit more of what we can offer, not only in terms of products and solutions, but also in other important aspects as really having a good time while we work together towards our joint goal.

Looking forward to on a regular basis keeping in touch with you !