About once a month at work they have what they call the “IT Road Show”. During lunch a person from an area will get up for an hour and talk about what their department does. Show some demonstrations. Answer questions. To encourage attendance they also offer free lunch. Nothing fancy, but still a nice treat. Various sandwiches. Pasta salad. Potato salad. Cookies. Pickles. Today was the second one I attended. It was about network latency, and tool that is available for us to simulate latency on our applications. I plain-speak: A program that I am writing that reads a database in Chicago works fine here, but a user in Australia might have problems because of how long data takes to travel their and back. This tool lets us simulate that delay so we can make our applications more efficient.

The IT Road Show I went to before was the group that delivers market data to the traders. Market data is information from Bloomburg, Reuters, etc. about stock prices, government reports, etc. Since we pay the market data providers for each feed, the tool that they built controls who gets to see what data, how much data they see. For example, a person trading oil futures doesn’t need to see data about farm production.