Coding for FinTech

Coding for FinTech

By Jordan Gillard, Software Engineer at Bloomberg

Hi! My name is Jordan Gillard. I’m a Software Engineer for Bloomberg in New York City.

I grew up in a near-West suburb of Chicago named River Forest. My first encounter with coding happened in middle school. Back then our computer classes were taught with a program called Microworlds. I learned how to use the Scheme programming language to move a tiny turtle around a 15” iMac G3 computer screen. I stopped coding once I went to high school, and I pursued a Bachelors in Geoscience at the University of Iowa.

I struggled to find a job in Geoscience after college. I spent some time as a substitute teacher, a community support specialist for a non-profit organization, and a kids kickboxing coach. I started contemplating pursuing software development. I vividly remember going to Coursera.org and completing the “Python for Everybody” specialization from the University of Michigan. I must’ve worked 10 hours a day for a week to complete the whole thing. I am thankful that during this time I was encouraged to pursue this goal by my friends who worked in Silicon Valley.

I discovered an online boot camp called RMOTR soon after. They offered a full scholarship for those with financial need. I was broke and living with my parents, so I applied. I received an acceptance email from one of the founders right before the start date of their next cohort. It was so exciting.

A fellow RMOTR graduate persuaded his company to hire me as a contractor soon after graduating. It was only around 10 hours a week of work, but I needed this professional experience in programming. I was tasked with querying data from multiple places relating to how users used the company’s mobile app. Some examples of the metrics I was working with are how many downloads there were that day, how many times a user opened the app, and how long they used the app for each session. I cleaned the data and sent it to a Google Cloud database. It took me forever to finish since I was still a rookie programmer!

I applied to software engineering roles in Chicago after I finished that contract work. I had a few interviews but my lack of formal computer science knowledge was evident. In a stint of boredom and frustration, I applied to software roles all over West and Central Europe. “Everyone wants to work as a software engineer in the US,” I thought, “so I’ll try my luck in another country.” I never traveled outside of North America, mind you. I wasn’t seriously considering what could happen.

Within an hour of applying for a position for Gastrofix GmbH in Berlin, Germany, I had an email asking when I could interview. I nailed the interviews over the following days, and ten days after initially applying I flew to Berlin via Turkish Airlines. The most foreign I ever felt was during my six-hour layover in Istanbul, Turkey. I remember asking two separate kiosks if they could fill my water bottle, and BOTH times they filled it with boiling water.

Soon after arriving in Germany, Illinois’ Elmhurst University accepted me into their Masters of Science program for Information Technology. I completed their program remotely outside of work. Let me tell you, working full time and pursuing grad school in a foreign country is rough. I woke up between 2 and 5 am for lectures twice a week. I wouldn’t recommend it!

I decided to move back to Chicago after two years in Berlin. The Canadian company Lightspeed purchased Gastrofix and I was given 3 months’ pay to leave. This was March 2020, the COVID pandemic had just begun so it felt like a good time to return home, and I missed the USA anyways. I didn’t have a plan and I wanted to get a master’s in Computer Science, so I knocked out an MS in CS from Virginia Tech during the first year of the pandemic. I was hired by Bloomberg after interviewing through a Virginia Tech career fair. So here I am now, writing this inside my peaceful Brooklyn apartment.

What I Work On Now

I write software that runs on the Bloomberg Terminal. The Bloomberg Terminal is the heart of finance software. It provides users with trading, analytics, news, instant messaging, email, legal information — anything Wall Street needs. Within the Terminal I work on EMSX, an execution and order management trading platform. Our users use EMSX to trade options, equities, and futures to over 1300 different brokers. It’s fascinating to work on, even if it’s incredibly complex.

Everything we create is written in code. I used to think stock trading was simple. I thought you either buy or sell, but the reality is different. Each stockbroker has different trading strategies and execution instructions. Users need real-time data on the securities they’re trading. They want to collaborate with other traders in their team and set up automated trade execution algorithms. We use code to handle all of that. We write frontend services that take care of the user interface and everything the client sees, and those services are constantly communicating and receiving data from backend services that run in our server farms. Just one simple click can lead to thousands of events transpiring, and all of those events happen with code.

Tips for Young Coders

Build things! Break things! Learn! If you can glean anything from my background it’s that the path to software engineering isn’t defined. All that matters is you keep growing and getting better. So make an awesome website or an awful one. Keep it fun. This industry can take you to Berlin, New York, Shanghai, who knows! It’s a roller coaster. Buy a ticket and take the ride.

Tools and Programming Languages I Use

I’ve used too many tools to count throughout my professional and academic career. I currently code in TypeScript, which is pretty much JavaScript with type annotations. It transpiled to JavaScript, which just means it is turned into JavaScript by the TypeScript transpiler. It works with all the JavaScript libraries you might know about, like React or Vue. My programs run in the Bloomberg Terminal, which operates like a web browser (i.e. Chrome or Firefox). We also use a bit of React for our frontend work. React is an awesome frontend library for building user interfaces.

I also write shell scripts in Bash. Bash is an old language that is run from Unix-like systems’ computer terminals. So it works on Linux, macOS, and Windows computers if Windows has the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) installed. I use a few of these when I work on our CI/CD pipelines (Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment) that run on Jenkins. I also enjoy writing backend code with Python whenever I get the chance.