Technological Thoughts by Jerome Kehrli

I needed to have a little fun recently when slacking on my computer at night so, as is often the case in such situation, I spent some time on my snake project again.
I implemented a few evolutions as explained below and am now working on making the auto-pilot algorithm a little better.
It's funny how this snake application is something on which I get over and over again years after years, trying to make it better, reworking it, etc.

The first post on this blog about this app was there : www.niceideas.ch/roller2/badtrash/entry/snake-tt-0-2-alpha
Yeah, well, that doesn't make me younger, does it ?

The snake project

Snake is a little C++ / OpenGL / Real-Time project which shows a snake eating apples on a two dimensional board. It really is very much like the famous Nokia phone game except the snake finds its way on its own.

No nice textures, no sweet drawings yet, the world elements are mostly simple spheres. Trivial OpenGL features such as fog, lightning and shadows are implemented though.

The auto-pilot is still pretty stupid at the moment and the snake ends up eating itself quite fast.
This is the thing on which I am working now.

It still is a game as the "user" can at any moment deactivate the auto-pilot and take the control of the snake himself. At any moment, the auto-pilot can be re-engaged again or deactivated.

The project is open-source'd under GNU LGPL license and if you're interested in OpenGL, Vector Geometry, Real-time C++ Programming, or simply Algorithms you might very well enjoy having a look at the source code provided here.

After almost two years as Head of R&D in my current company, I believe I succeeded in bringing Agility to Software Development here by mixing what I think makes most sense out of eXtreme Programing, Scrum, Kanban, DevOps practices, Lean Startup practices, etc.
I am strong advocate of Agility at every level and all the related practices as a whole, with a clear understanding of what can be their benefits. Leveraging on the initial practices already in place to transform the development team here into a state of the art Agile team has been - and still is - one of my most important initial objectives.
I gave myself two years initially to bring this transformation to the Software Development here. After 18 months, I believe we're almost at the end of the road and its a good time to take a step back and analyze the situation, trying to clarify what we do, how we do it, and more importantly why we do it.

As a matter of fact, we are working in a full Agile way in the Software Development Team here and we are having not only quite a great success with it but also a lot of pleasure.
I want to share here our development methodology, the philosophy and concepts behind it, the practices we have put in place as well as the tools we are using in a detailed and precise way.
I hope and believe our lessons learned can benefit others.
As a sidenote, and to be perfectly honest, while we may not be 100% already there in regards to some of the things I am presenting in this article, at least we have identified the gap and we're moving forward. At the end of the day, this is what matters the most to me.

This article presents all the concepts and practices regarding Agile Software Development that we have put (or are putting) in place in my current company and gives our secrete recipe which makes us successful, with both a great productivity / short lead time on one side and great pleasure and efficiency in our every day activities on the other side.

Ethical hacking is a very interesting field, and a pretty funny hobby. Well, ya all penetration tester out there, don't get me wrong: I am well aware that Penetration testing and Ethical Hacking is a full and challenging Software Engineering Field and an actual profession, don't get upset.

I am rather saying that studying vulnerabilities exploitation techniques in one's free time is pretty fun and intellectually rewarding. With the all time and everywhere connection of everything for all kind of usages (understand Internet of Things), current focus in the field of vulnerabilities exploitation is really on Web application, networks, distributed systems, etc.
In addition, most recent progresses in CPU-level protections and compiler-level protections have made local programs exploitation techniques somewhat outdated and such techniques are not very much presented or discussed anymore.

During my master studies, I followed an extended set of lectures on Ethical Hacking and Software Security in general and got quite interested in the field. I wrote a paper for a study in the context of the university at that time which I am reporting today in this blog.
The following article presents various classical vulnerabilities exploitation techniques on local programs.

I interested myself deeply in the blockchain topic recently and this is the first article of a coming whole serie around the blockchain.

This article presents an introduction on the blockchain, presents what it is in the light of its initial deployment in the Bitcoin project as well as all technical details and architecture concerns behind it.
We won't focus here on business applications aside from what is required to present the blockchain purpose, more concrete business applications and evolutions will be the topic of another post in the coming days / weeks.

This article presents and explains all the key techniques and mechanisms behind the blockchain technology.

The blockchain principles and fundamentals are really coming initially from the design work on the Bitcoin. Most of this article focuses on the design and the principle of the blockchain put in place in the Bitcoin system.
Some more recent (Blockchain 2.0) implementations differ slightly while still sharing most genes with the original blockchain, making all that is presented below valid from a conceptual perspective in these other implementations as well.

The blockchain and blockchain related topics are becoming increasingly discussed and studied. There is not one single day where I don't hear about it, that being on linkedin or elsewhere.

I kept myself busy on other topics these last years, mostly large scale information systems and analytic systems architecture in the finance business so I really missed the Bitcoin and blockchain hype.
I've been to an OCTO Technology event recently on the Blockchain. To be honest I went there more for the pleasure of seeing my former colleagues than for any specific interest on the topic. Yet I listen carefully to OCTO's presentation ... and I didn't imagine I would be so much intrigued and soon passionated by the subject.

I strongly believe the blockchain technology has the potential to be one of the most disruptive progress in computer sciences of these 10 last years. I studied and keep studying all the technical details, evolutions and business implications of this technology and will post various blog articles in the coming days / weeks about this topic:

• First article is : Blockchain explained. I am giving a clear explanation of all the technical nuts and bolts behind the blockchain technologies.
• Second is : Blockchain 2.0 - from bitcoin transactions to blockchain applications
• Third one will be : Blockchain - various business opportunities where I will discuss how the blockchain can (and will) disrupt several fields.

Big Data technologies are increasingly used in retail banking institutions for customer profiling or other marketing activities. In private banking institutions, however, applications are less obvious and there are only very few initiatives.
Yet, as a matter of fact, there are opportunities in such institutions and they can be quite surprising.

Big Data technologies, initiated by the Web Giants such as Google or Amazon, enable to analyze very massive amount of data (ranging from Terabytes to Petabytes). Apache Hadoop is the de-facto standard nowadays when it comes to considering Open Source Big Data technologies but it is increasingly challenged by alternatives such as Apache Spark or others providing less constraining programming paradigms than Map-Reduce.

These Big Data Processing Platform benefits from the NoSQL genes : the CAP Theorem when it comes to storing data, the usage of commodity hardware, the capacity to scale-out (almost) linearly (instead of scaling up your Oracle DB) and a much lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) than standard architectures.

Most essential applications for such technologies in retail banking institutions consist in gathering knowledge and insights on the customer base, customer's profiles and their tendencies by using cutting-edge Machine Learning techniques on such data.

In contrary to retail banking institutions that are exploiting such technologies for many years, private banking institution, with their very low amount of transactions and their limited customer base are considering these technologies with a lot of skepticism and condescension.

However, in contrary to preconceived ideas, use case exist and present surprising opportunities, mostly around three topics :

• Enhance proximity with customers
• Improve investment advisory services
• Reduce computation costs