• Our day starts at 6am.  We usually finish at 2 or 3.  Overtime is unusual, lunch provided, wear what you want.
• Fulltime position, no travel, competitive salary, excellent benefits.

 Requirements:

• Disciplined and calm.  This is a frequently busy, sometimes stressful environment.
• Comfortable configuring and testing a variety of software, both in-house software and commercial products. 
• Experienced with network routing on Windows.  Comfortable with tracert, routing tables and multi-homed machines.
• Familiarity with the various kinds of network traffic (TCP, UDP Unicast, UDP Multicast).
• Basic Windows system administration; installing and upgrading Windows, configuring the standard Microsoft applications.
• Understanding of the OSI network layers model.
• Some scripting language experience, such as one of the following: VBScript, Perl, Python, Ruby.

 Desired:

• Linux and/or Solaris administration or performance tuning experience.
• Network tuning experience, at the NIC, router or OS levels.
• Basic Java or C# programming experience.

Monitize it by showing google ads for whatever they are searching on, or by including ads in the notification emails.

The only ones I can find are desktop applications, which is the wrong way to build this. My sister wants the same thing.  She uses a mac, which is another reason not to build a desktop application.

UPDATE: Ian Drake explains why monitoring Craigslist is difficult.  CL blocks the IP of any server that sends many automated queries.  Ian’s company, NotifyWire, gets around this by having each user run a desktop application, these applications join together to form a cloud that can query Craigslist frequently from many different IPs.

Below are my lightly edited notes:

CTO of CBOE
- Intel’s new Nehalem processor has excellent performance; it does overclocking on the fly. 
- 300k transactions per second (up from 5k in 2001, after starting the Java project in 1998)

Java 7
- Infiniband support, direct NIC access
- async nio
- G1 garbage collector, much easier to tune than CMS

Real World Real-time
- Mike Fulton, IBM Canada
- Stop The World GC provides very good throughput
- IBM’s JVM has a Generational GC called “metronome”, does frequent GCs that take a consistent 1 ms
- standard JVMs basically ignore thread priorities
- IBM has a RTSJ compliant JVM
- higher priority threads tend to have less work to do, and therefore complete quickly
- setup SCHED_FIFO threads, thread are less likely to be paused by the OS
- Ahead of time compilation cannot do some optimizations (mostly in-lining) that are allowed at runtime, so dynamic compilation performance is better than ahead-of-time
- can do ahead-of-time compilation; can then do additional dynamic compilation at runtime. 

- RedHat, Novell have realtime linux distributions, plus Solaris, AIX
- the realtime OSes work to eliminate variablity, not to increase overall speed

JVM Performance talk
- max performance setup is Intel 5570 running 6u14-p
- 64 bit performance now exceeds 32 bit performance, and tuning efforts are going to be concentrated on 64bit

- Try the G1 gc
- Use all available hw threads for max throughput
- Xx usenuma flag on numa machines
- Xx Usecompressedoops
- Experiment with Intel’s VTune, use the latest version

Garbage Collection Tuning (not applicable to G1)

- Supervise the heap, don’t exceed available memory on the box (not total memory, but available memory)

- Disable virtual memory as we don’t want to use it?

- The time to collect the young generation is proportional to the size of objects that survive, not to the size of the heap being collected.

- Experiment with –XX +PrintTenuringDistribution

- Should always have some GC logging enabled in the production, the cost is minimal:

- PrintGCTimeStamps, PrintGCDetails and –xloggc:<filename> to start

- use a script to analyize the logs, e.g., PrictGCDetails

Let me end this section by emphasizing once again the

difference between real wealth and the real economy on

one hand, and illusionary wealth and debt on the other.  If

we had let all the reckless bankers go out of business, we

would not have blown up our houses or our factories, or

carted off our machine tools to Russia, nor would we have

machine gunned any of our educated workforce, even our

bankers!  When the smoke had cleared, those with money

would have bought up the bankrupt assets at cents on the

dollar and we would have had a sharp recovery in the

economy.  Moral hazard would have been crushed, lessons

learned for a generation or two, and assets would be in

stronger, more efficient hands.  Debt is accounting, not

reality.  Real economies are much more resilient than they

are given credit for.  We allow ourselves to be terrified by

the “financial-industrial complex” as Eisenhower might

have said, much to their advantage.

You should have experience with strategies that trade millions of shares per day, remaining hedged throughout the day. We have the software, networking and infrastructure in place to compete in ultra low-latency trades, now we need help finding more trades.

Compensation includes a percentage of any trades you create; we are open to consultants or full time staff.

No third parties please, contact me at tgraham <at> mwdenergy <dot> com

We’re serious about software quality and performance.  Development is test-driven, production code is peer-reviewed; this is a 3-4 person project in Java using Eclipse, jUnit, Subversion, CruiseControl.  Speed to market is important to us, we do not have a formal QA team and we deploy to production frequently.  You need to be comfortable deploying features and/or fixes to production.

Job description:

1. This job has two parts, the amount of time dedicated to each part will vary, but will start off roughly 50/50:
   1. Programming

                                                               i.      Developing a “supervisor” application that controls the trading systems and gathers statistics from each system.

                                                             ii.      Mining, comparing and displaying the gathered statistics.

                                                            iii.      Developing performance comparison applications.

                                                            iv.      Other development as needed, in Java or a scripting language.

1.  
   1. Technical support for the traders:

                                                               i.      Configuring and updating the software; reading logs to troubleshoot problems; performance testing.

                                                             ii.      We spend lots of time talking with the traders about the best way to use the current software and possible improvements.

                                                            iii.      Setting up new trades is a pain right now, we need help doing it, and we need to make it more automated. 

                                                            iv.      Network latency is critical to us; we spend considerable time thinking about it and measuring it.

1. Schedule is 6 am – 2 pm, overtime is unusual, lunch provided, wear what you want.
2. Fulltime position, no travel, competitive salary, excellent benefits.

Required skills:

1. Several years development experience in Java or C#, preferably Java.
2. Experience or enthusiasm about test-driven development, peer code review, continuous integration and pair programming.
3. Adaptability.  This is a small firm, less than 20 people and only 10 people in the electronic trading group, so you have to willing to do anything, including going out to pick up lunch if the normal person is busy.
4. Financial markets experience is NOT required; we’ll teach you what you need to know.

Nice to have:

1. Experience in non-web applications; such as distributed client/server programming. We like to see experience on applications that are more than a front-end to a database.
2. Knowledge of different networking protocols (e.g., TCP vs. UDP).
3. Experience writing concurrent programs; i.e., multi-threaded programming.
4. Experience with software profiling and system analysis tools, such as a profiler or DTrace/BTrace.
5. Experience in a language different from Java, such as Erlang, Python, Perl, gawk, Ruby, F#, etc.
6. Experience gathering and data mining large data sets.
7. Simple network administration experience, such as adding routes.
8. Experience on multiple platforms such as Solaris, Linux, Windows, etc.

 No recruiters please.

 Send resumes to me at tgraham <at> mwdenergy.com

Thanks,

Ted

LinkedCells is a software product that allows Excel users to easily share their spreadsheet data with other Excel users.  Unlike other collaborative tools, LinkedCells functions completely within Excel, where Excel users are most comfortable.  You can currently download the product and use it for free from the website.

LinkedCells was founded by two professional software developers (Bob Whiton and Ted Graham), both of whom have more than 10 years experience.  We’re serious software people, and the code shows it.  The code is in great shape, nicely commented and comprehensively unit tested (via nUnit tests).  Our marketing and web design skills are another story. ;)

After 6 months of development, a product review with a team of seasoned startup advisors, and a few late nights, LinkedCells was released as a free Beta in April 2007.  We were excited to get a positive review from Colorado Startups and we quickly started gaining users.  Soon after release, we both had children, Bob started a new project and Ted moved to a hedge fund to lead the development of a new trading system.  While we believe LinkedCells has potential, we’re too busy to realize it. 

Therefore, we’re offering LinkedCells for sale.  Depending on the buyer, LinkedCells could grow into a profitable software business, or be built up for sale to a competitor.

What’s included:

• All source code.  The product is written in C# as an Excel addin, the server is a .NET 2.0 Web Service (also in C#) and the database is SQL Server.  There software is roughly 12k lines of code.  We use Subversion for Version Control, and we will export our repository so you can see the change history.
• Web site.  The domain name and accompanying web pages are included.  The website was developed using ASP.NET and CSS.  We’re currently hosted at www.ultimahosts.com, but the database and hosting can be transferred to any host that supports .NET/SQL Server.
• Customer list.  Currently, there are more than 800 registered users.  Their email addresses and usage history are included.
• Product Design and Marketing documents, including some competitive analysis and a reasonable draft of a 2.0 functional specification. 

Please review the information on our website for further details on the product.  Feel free to contact us with further questions at team@linkedcells.com.

I’d bet most of you have an old computer you aren’t using.  Thanks for considering donating.