About Me

Employment

I currently work at RBS where I’m an Architect in the High Performance Computing team specialising in distributed caching, in particular Oracle Coherence. This has been a great role and I’ve particularly enjoyed the wide variety of problems posed by the different teams I interact with. The only downside has been being a one-man-band: I miss having a team.

Previously I was at Thoughtworks where I did the whole Agile thing.  It was a great experience working for this truly unique company for whom I have a deep affection.

Before moving to consultancy I worked for Barclays Capital for seven or so years. I like to think of this as my apprenticeship. Barcap is not the easiest place to work in may ways but  the environment was very formative. I was lucky to meet some very smart people and get some great opportunities. It was fun.

Academics

I graduated with distinction from a part time MSc in Information Systems and have a previous Masters in Physics from Imperial College where I also won the Rectors prize for Public Speaking (View Presentation Animation), something I was very proud of at the time. My MSc project involved the development of a framework for experimenting with software evolution and lead to the bellow publications:

- Chapter in the book “Software Process Change” part of the Lecture Notes on Computer Science series (here)
- ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (here)
- Paper at the International Workshop on Process Simulation’ at ICSE 2006 in Shanghai (here)
- AWEC (Australian Software Engineering Conf.) in 2009 (here)

Interests

I’m a keen snowboarder, surfer, downhill mountain biker and enjoy a boogie if I can find anyone that can dance West Coast Swing.

ben (2).



About

ben (2) 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 distribted caching, in particular with Coherence, and this has inevitably shaped my understanding of systems, so keep that in mind as you read on.

The articles here really fall into two categories: Coherence stuff that I know, and wider issues of distributed computing, running projects and the like, which I find interesting. You can read a little more about me here.

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