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/



About

I’ve worked with software and with computers for a while now. Long enough to sometimes be useful but not so long as to have lost interest.

My experiences of late have largely focused around distributed data storage, in particular Oracle Coherence, and this has inevitably shaped my understanding of systems, so keep that in mind as you read on.

The articles above are those that are recent or popular. There are a variety of other articles, categorised to the right and more traditional blog entries below.

You can read a little more about me here.

Talks