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@ -327,6 +327,87 @@ Problematic: development of a benchmark framework
# Illustrated analysis of acquired skills
## Working in a team and project management
Delivering a product is the goal of working in a business. However the process
to get from zero to final product is unique to every company.
During our project management classes, we were taught various ways of planning
a product from before the first line of code to its final delivery. The
prevailing culture in our industry in the last decade has been to adopt an agile
work environment: evolve the product and its product backlog alongside each
other, adapting to changing requirements. This is in sharp contrast to the
traditional way of planning projects, called *Waterfall*, where a specification
of behaviour is drawn upfront, and worked on for a long period of time with
little to no modification done to that project charter.
We can say that IMC has embraced a more Agile way of delivering new features:
the products are continuously being worked on and improved, the work being
organized into a backlog of issues, partitioned into epics. And similarly,
the company culture embraces a few of the processes associated with Agile
programming. The one has most affected me is the daily stand up, a meeting
organized in the morning to interact with the rest of the team, summarising the
work that has been accomplished the day before, and what one wishes to work on
during the day.
During the times of remote-work because of COVID, interactions with the team at
large feel more limited than they otherwise would be when working alongside one
another at the office. I have learned to communicate better with my colleagues:
explain what I am working on, reaching out to ask questions, and discussing
issues with them.
## Working in a large code base
IMC has a large body of code written to fulfil their business needs. It is rare
to work on a pre-existing code-base during the school curriculum. The few
projects that do provide you with a basis of code to complete them are at scales
that have nothing to do with what I had to get acclimated to at IMC.
This has multiple ramifications, all linked to the amount of knowledge embedded
in the code. It is simply impossible to understand everything in depth, one
cannot hold the entirety of the logic that has been written in their head.
Due to that difference, my way of writing software and squashing bugs had to
evolve, from an approach that worked on small programs to one that is more
scalable: I could not just dive into a problem head-first, trying to understand
everything that happens down to every detail, before being able to fix the
problem. The amount of minutia is too large, it would not be productive to try
to derive an understanding of the whole application before starting to work on
it.
Instead I had to revise my approach, getting surface level understanding of the
broad strokes, thinking more carefully about the implications of an introduced
change, coming up with a theory and confirming it.
This is only possible because of my prior experience on the large number of
projects I had to work on at EPITA, exposing me to a various subjects and
sharpening my inductive skills, building my intuition for picking out the
important pieces of a puzzle.
## Debugging distributed systems
My work specifically centers around running, interacting with, instrumenting,
and observing production binaries for use in testing or benchmarking.
Due to this, and because nobody writes perfect code the first time, I have had
to inspect and debug various issues between my code and the software I was
running under it. That kind of scenario is difficult to inspect, make sense of,
and debug. The behaviour is distributed over multiple separate processes, each
of which carries its own state.
In a way that is similar to our Distribute Algorithms final project, to tackle
those issues I had to think about the states of my processes carefully. I had to
reflect on the problem I encountered, trying to reverse-engineer what must have
gone wrong to get to that situation, and make further observations to further my
understanding of the issue.
This iterative process of chipping away at the problem until the issue becomes
self-evident is inherent with working on such systems. One cannot just inspect
all the processes at once, and immediately derive what must have happened to
them. It feels more akin to detective work, with the usual suspect not being Mrs
Pink in the living room with the chandelier, but instead my own self having
forgotten to account for an edge case.
# Benefits of the internship
## Contributions to the company
@ -459,12 +540,6 @@ expect few places to be as well-rounded as IMC.
## Vocabulary
Market-making
: A market-maker provides liquidity to the market by continuously quoting both
sell and trade prices on the market, hoping to make a profit on the *bid-ask
spread*.
Bid and ask
: Respectively the price for buying and selling a stock or other financial
@ -476,6 +551,12 @@ Continuous Integration
: The practice of automating the integration of code from multiple contributors
into a single software project.
Market-making
: A market-maker provides liquidity to the market by continuously quoting both
sell and trade prices on the market, hoping to make a profit on the *bid-ask
spread*.
## About IMC
International Marketmakers Combinations (IMC) was founded in 1989 in Amsterdam,