A Year in Review and ChronosES

It has been a full year since we wrote our first blog post here at Belvedere last May. In our inaugural post, we spoke about the importance of Open Source software and the three areas in which we primarily use such software: BT Development Process, Data Persistence and Environment. If you have been an avid reader of our blog, you will have noticed its central theme of continuous integration with an in-depth focus on judging quality.

The news covers technical glitches in the financial markets -- and the costly consequences -- every day. We know that with a system as expansive and heterogeneous as ours at BT, it is crucial to take quality seriously. The level of engineering that is needed to develop large distributed systems always amazes and impresses me. It is a far cry from the hacked-together programs that we pushed out in university or scrambled to produce in entry interviews.

We are now in an unparalleled time for technology; in fact, the sheer amount of instrumentation with which one can start a new project is compelling. Sometimes, the hardest part is picking the right technology for the job. As we mentioned in our first post, at BT we do have to keep our low latency systems proprietary; however, we’ve been able to delve at length into the myriad other systems that we embrace in the Open Source community.

Image from MSDN.

It’s a privilege almost every month to push out an entry, and we realize that ten blog posts are only a small contribution. In that vein, we are excited to Open Source our ChronosES system. ChronosES is our interpretation of a CQRS-ES event store, and we feel that it brings a new facet to the community. This year, we will have multiple articles on architecture, usage and the deployment of this system, culminating its release. Most importantly, at Belvedere we have “dog fed” this system and rely on it daily for our trading systems. We are using it every day here, and will be with you every step of the way.