[Banking-pm] Introduction (and Re: Any newbies?)

[John Costello]

On Fri, 8 Sep 2006 alex at owal.co.uk wrote:
> Have we persuaded anybody to join the list who doesnt work in finance -
> but is thinking about it?
> 
> Alex

Hello,

I don't live in London (or the UK for that matter), but I am interested in
the finance industry.  Currently, I work in the IT organization of an EDA
company, performing odd jobs often with perl; so far, no one has asked me
to do anything involving thrown bowlers.

My current project involves migration of data from a shift-jis
application, including romaji and kanji characters, into a fixed-length
format fit for upload into another system.  This has involved digging into 
unicode, which has been interesting, as well as data munging.  I'm glad 
that Dave Cross mentioned his data munging book.

I've knocked out perl scripts for various tasks at this company.  
Previously, I worked in IT for two other organizations (sendmail, poke
users in eyes, make computers work) and got a work trip to London out of
one of the gigs.  Not bad.

Before all of that, I worked for a tiny software company that dealt with
HR systems.  What others have said about the specifics of finance applies
to the HR industry--there are terminologies and practices that you have to
breathe in over time.  Nobody teaches them to you.  Most of my work at
that company involved data munging, report creation, and the like using an
in-house scripting language that was similar to perl.

Lately I've been using perl under cygwin, as ActiveState didn't have the 
modules I needed and I there were periods when I didn't have a *nix server 
to work on.  I've also worked on perl under Solaris and Linux, doing 
various things to and with cgi, sql, html, and text files.

John