Big City Jobs & The Trader Years

So the time came to move into the country's capital, and there I had the chance to work for the first time with a stablished large team, with standardized methodologies for development and well-defined practices.

Maxnegocios

Here was also my professional introduction to the world of web frameworks, and the ever-growing philosophy of "don't reinvent the wheel", with both its pros and cons. CakePHP was the usual suspect in this case. The platform relied on it for the backend, alongside a MySQL database, and a jquery-heavy frontend. My work as full-stack was mainly on the modules for blogging and social networking.

But it wasn't too long before I convinced my former boss—it was another one this time but a pattern started to emerge—to go on our own and launch another company:

Visionware

This is the largest team I've lead so far. We invested in developing a couple of small original products, but our overall approach was much more pragmatical and risk-averse, so the company focused mostly on servicing larger clients in web and mobile projects.

The highlights for me during this period were:

  • Leading several projects simultaneously
  • Coaching and assisting the more junior members of our organization

  • While still being able to contribute individually with my own programming

  • While making larger technical decisions for the company as CTO

I kept a balancing act of these, at least for a while, because at some point around 2014 I became a little obssessed with the following:

Foreign Exchange Trading

Of all the entries in my career, this is probably one of the most atypical. I'll make the story short by saying that I spent a lot of energy and time trying to chase a so-called "holy grail" of automated trading, it was supposed to grant me financial freedom, it was the way to beat the games of money and currencies on their own turf.

It was a nice concept, but I grew tired—after many attempts—of being absorbed in a system that only works with money for the sake of money, exchanging one currency for another virtually in one global delusion, adding no real value in the world.

Anyway ... some of the work I kept it around, a few of my github repositories remain as testament of this phase:

AlxFx: I developed a custom backtesting system. This is one of the tools traders use to test strategies by simulating real transactions with past market data. It was a very interesting challenge, I needed to process millions of records representing years of values for various currencies, and run different operations on top of this giant pool of monetary fluctuations. This one was specialized to work with Dukascopy's JForex platform, and so Java was chosen because that was their their technology of choice (I remain to this day very agnostic regarding tech stacks, I'll use whatever works best for the purpose at hand).

Fx2017Indis: and EA_graveyard: A collection of strategies and indicators to work within the Metatrader platform. They use the MQL (MetaQuotes) language, a sort of C++ super niche cousin.

But ... eventually The Wolf of Wall Street was no more ... I moved to Uruguay, new life and new job, more of that in the next section.