Jonathan Hodgson - Example work

As a team of five developers and a graphic artist, this brand new site had the aim to catch-up and surpass BNP Paribas' competition in the on-line space. It was first released internally in September 2001 where it was very well received, quickly removing the need to distribute paper-based research internally and giving Equities a one-stop forum for all information.
In December of the same year, the site was launched externally to clients and made multi-lingual to focus directly on the main French clients.

In the Euromoney 2002 awards for “Best Equity website” we came joint-second. Key factors they mentioned were the ease of navigation and quality of the on-line tools, such as the Interactive Sectormap.

The site was developed using Microsoft technology, ASP for the presentation layer calling VB COM objects talking via stored procedures to SQL Server 2000. Disconnected ADO recordsets and XML datasets were used on the server-side to send the front-end of HTML, DHTML and javascript to the client.

As senior developer and technical architect on the project I wrote the session-state, security and page framework; this meant the other developers could concentrate on the main body of the pages.

At the start of the project I researched into many new technologies in order to identify and meet the business requirements. Much of the knowledge gained, I then documented for my team and for consultancy to other internals groups within the company.

The system consists of a webfarm of IIS servers, DCOM to the COM+ middle-tier (to provide a security break in protocol and to off-load processing from the presentation layer) and then to the back-end SQL Server database. On the intranet a similar setup, with all documents replicated externally for the Internet to a server farm in the DMZ.

SQL DTS scripts imported new data changes throughout the day and over-night to supply the latest financial information. All servers were made resilient by either load-balancing or clustering technologies, BIG/IP for the IIS and active-passive fail-over for the document storage and SQL Server.

Visit http://equities.bnpparibas.com/

Stock coverage showing recent research publications

Advanced server-side charting and caching for performance

Interactive Sectormap, an innovative tool for spotting changes and anomalies in stock analysis

Interactive Stockscreener, it allows clients to 'slice and dice' their own data sets

SQL Server 2000 DTS Script for importing of financial data on a daily basis

A diagram showing the secure 3-tier architecture on the Internet and 2-tier for optimal speed on the intranet

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Whilst working in the Technical Consulting Group within BNP Paribas, a business requirement was to remove old Bloomberg terminals and to provide a real-time communication system globally.

Over four months I worked with two other developers to build the system. It needed to allow different channels for communications and full audit and history tracing as a legal and compliance commitment.
The system went live in June 1999 before instant messaging was well known. It still in use today by the trading and sales forces globally, with normal concurrent usage levels of 700 clients talking 24 x 7.

I developed the initial prototype proof of concept in VB using Winsock controls. We then engineered the backend, using object-orientated design techniques, as VC++ DLLs hosted in MTS and messages persisted in SQL Server 6.5. My responsibility was the front-end VB application that used another VC++ COM objects for messaging transport and events.

The teams main role was to develop rapid solutions for both Equity and Fixed Income business lines and also provide consultancy of other IT teams. We also acted as the central team when deciding upon the standards, such as e-mail, charting and UI components and other technologies from a developer perspective.

A private global messenging system used by the trading and sales departments to efficiently communicate newsflow

Security and authorisation administration application to manage the user base

Modern UI design with additional fields persisted to the backend database

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Whilst working for a new small business that specialises in Control & Instrumentation systems I was involved in a number of projects.

Working through the analysis, design and implementation of a Windows based monitoring package written in Visual Basic and Microsoft C++ 7.0.

The system communicated with external transmitters spread across large sites, and provided visual feedback of levels, temperatures, volumes and alarms on the oil storage tanks.

I gained real experience writing communications software to talk with external devices via the PC, using different protocols and decoding information at the byte-stream level in real-time.

It was expected that I worked to tight deadlines and was also available to make site visits to assist with engineer installations.

Consolided view of the entire plant giving operators immediate feedback and notification of changes

Ability to zoom-in and see additional details on a tank with live updates being decoded from the transmitter protocol

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Nearly every project involves creating reports and the main applications that everyone is used to are Microsoft Word, Excel and Access.

I have written many small projects in VBA during my career, from advanced real-time and historic data retrieval directly in Excel spreadsheets for the traders to stock-control and asset management systems.

Most recently, the management asked employees to vote and comment on each other on-line, for example: research on sales trading, trading on syndication, etc. This information was collected and then reported as bound documents to all senior business heads. Extracting data directly from SQL Server via ADO, a Word document was generated including charting from Excel via automation.

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These are just promotional sites I created for friends to advertise their businesses.

I show them here to show my interest in the Internet, sometimes it's very refreshing to have a change from coding large systems and to work on a small project.

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