About Me
Career
These days I’m an architect/engineer type at RBS, originally in High Performance Computing and more recently in Risk & Finance where I’ve been working on ODC: a large data-store that uses Coherence as a system of record (more detail here). The project won the Banking Technology Award for “Best use of IT in Corporate and Investment Banking” and led to a few talks and papers about its somewhat novel architecture. Previously I was at Thoughtworks - a fantastic place with truly unique people for whom I have a deep affection. Before moving to consultancy I worked for Barclays Capital for seven or so years and as a Research Physicist for a year or so before that.
Academics
I hold Master’s degrees in both Information Systems and Physics. My MSc project involved the the modelling of software evolution using a Monte Carlo approach and led to some of the publications below. At Imperial College I also won the Rectors prize for Public Speaking (View Presentation Animation).
Academic Publications
- Test Oriented Languages: Is it Time for a New Era? RefTest at IEEE International Conference on Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST), 25th March 2011, Berlin, Germany (here)
- Enabling Testing, Design and Refactoring Practices in Remote Locations. RefTest at IEEE International Conference on Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST), 25th March 2011, Berlin, Germany (here)
- Simulating Software Evolution with Varying Numbers of Developers and Validation Using OSS, Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC) 2009 (here)
- Chapter in the book “Software Process Change” part of the Lecture Notes on Computer Science series (here)
- ACM Transactions on Modelling and Computer Simulation (here)
- Paper at the International Workshop on Process Simulation’ at ICSE 2006 in Shanghai (here)
Talks
- Balancing Replication and Partitioning in a Distributed Java Database. JavaOne. San Francisco, October 2011
- Beyond the Data Grid: Coherence, Normalisation, Joins and Linear Scalability. QCon London, March 2011 (here)
- Beyond Caching and Data Grids: Lessons in using Coherence as a System of Record, January 2011 (here)
- Has Mocking Gone Wrong? Reftest Symposium, Feb 2010 (here)
- The Architect’s Two Hats: Designing for the Human vs. Designing for the Machine. Software Architecture Course, University of Brunel, 2008 (here)
- Architecting for Change: An Agile Approach. Software Architecture Course, University of Brunel, 2007 (here)
Interests
I’m a keen snowboarder, surfer, downhill mountain biker and enjoy a boogie if I can find anyone who can dance West Coast Swing.
Contact: benstopford(at)gmail.com
Other People That Matter
My lovely sister: http://www.whiterabbitfilms.com
Pat Kua: http://thekua.com
Brian Oliver: http://www.brianoliver.com
Kuldeep Singh: http://elope.wordpress.com/
David Falcey: http://blogs.oracle.com/felcey/
