investigating software

When it comes to rolling out updates to large complex banking systems, things can get messy quickly. Of course, the holy grail is to have each subsystem work well independently and to do some form of Pact or contract testing – reducing the complex and painful integration work. But nonetheless – at some point you are going to need to see if the dog and the pony can do their show together – and its generally better to do that in a way that doesn’t make millions of pounds of transactions fail – in a highly public manner, in production.  (This post is based on my recent lightning talk at  PyData London ) For the last few years, I’ve worked in the world of high value, real time and cross border payments, And one of the sticking points in bank [software] integration is message generation. A lot of time is spent dreaming up and creating those messages, then maintaining what you have just built. The world of payments runs on messages, these days they are often XML messages – and they can be pa

 As I write this, my dog is grumpily moving around the room pausing intermittently to give me disappointed looks - looks that only my elderly mother could compete with. She (my dog) is annoyed by the robot vacuum cleaner. Its not been run for a while in that room - and its making a noisy foray into dark corners in a valiant effort to cleanse the mess. Its grinding gears and the cloud of dust in its wake is not helping to ease the dogs nerves. The dog's pleading puppy dog eyes & emotions have of course been anthropomorphised - at least a bit - by me (My dog is 7 years old and weighs over 20kg - so has little to fear). That is - I've taken human feelings and mapped them onto my dog. I know she has emotions - but she lacks language - or at least a language that (1) we humans understand, (2) maps to the same phrases or concepts I'm using. But I'm human, That's how I think and how I interact with people and sometimes - machines. Deciphering the problem and representi

There’s a great scene in the Simpsons where the Monorail salesman comes to town and everyone (except Lisa of course) is quickly entranced by Monorail fever… He has an answer for every question and guess what? The Monorail will solve all the problems… somehow. The hype around Generative AI can seem a bit like that, and like Monorail-guy the sales-guy’s assure you Gen AI will solve all your problems - but can be pretty vague on the “how” part of the answer. So I’m going to provide a few short guides into how Generative (& other forms of AI) Artificial Intelligence can help you and your team. I’ll pitch the technical level differently for each one, and we’ll start with something fairly not technical: Custom Chatbots. ChatBots these days have evolved from the crude web sales tools of ten years ago, designed to hoover up leads for the sales team. They can now provide informative answers to questions based on documents or websites. If we take the most famous: Chat GPT 4. If we ignore the

 In 316 AD Emperor Constantine issued a new coin,  there's nothing too unique about that in itself. But this coin is significant due to its pagan/roman religious symbols. Why is this odd? Constantine had converted himself, and probably with little consultation -  his empire to Christianity, years before. Yet the coin shows the emperor and the (pagan) sun god Sol.  Looks Legit! While this seems out of place, to us (1700 years later), it's not entirely surprising. Constantine and his people had followed different, older gods for centuries. The people would have been raised and taught the old pagan stories, and when presented with a new narrative it's not surprising they borrowed from and felt comfortable with both. I've seen much the same behaviour with Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. You can provide them with fresh new data, from your own documents, but what's to stop it from listening to its old training instead?  You could spend a lot of time collating,

I play a card game called cribbage. I often play it with my son . One interesting part of the game is the muggins rule. This means that you can claim points from other players turns, if they miscount the score.  The scoring is slightly nerve racking, with each of us double and triple checking our scores, to avoid falling foul of ‘muggins’, that’s part of the fun.  But my son and I also find ourselves discussing other hands of cards, in a sort of alternate history version of the game. “So if I had a 7 instead of a 2 of hearts, then I’d get a double run and score at least 8 more points”.   “Yes Dad, if you had different cards then you would likely have a different score, but you don’t” he says while rolling his eyes.  This sort of bitter-sweet history rewriting is a convenient tool for us to swallow the awkward truth of the real world. We often create alternate things to object to.  Take Chat GPT 4 and tools like Copilot X. These are powerful tools, capable of doing useful tasks quicker

 I was lucky enough to have started my career in a small company and then in a start-up. Both provided me with an environment perfect for learning. I sat with experts who took time out of their day to help answer my questions. From them, I learned the basics of what I still use today.  I’ve built on those foundations, but things would have been much harder if I didn’t have those foundational moments of my career. I’m not just talking about technical skills, the mentoring on how companies work, consulting and how to be better generally.  But those technical skills were also a big part of it – and a part many people miss out on in their careers. The rise of Large Language Models like ChatGPT4 is rapidly helping to fill that gap – where people don’t have a technical mentor who can explain and help work through those technical problems.  I’m no longer that junior team member – asking the dumb questions (OK, well usually I’m not) but even I find Chat GPT excellent at consolidating a broad s

“I figured it was just a jumbo jet.” My son and I shake our heads & then adopt blank stares as if a non-body-snatcher has been exposed in our midst. “Twin engine,” I utter, as I glance skyward again. “Single decker” My son adds as an explanation. “It’s a plane”, she retorts, rolling her eyes. My wife, (who is far smarter than myself) lacks my son and I’s ability to recognise aircraft. She has the typical persons ability to recognise aeroplanes. I grew up around airforce bases. I had a father who was an aircraft engineer. Years of exposure and explanations regarding aeroplanes, their mechanics and features. We took this to the next level... My son is an avid flight sim game player and has consumed many hours of relevant youtube material on the subject. He also had the luck/misfortune of me discussing the planes that frequent the skies, above us here, near London. Given our combined experience & expertise, we probably have a reasonable ability to reco