Accessibility Design Day’22 and ’21

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Peter Smulovics

For me, accessibility has been a very important topic for quite a while. Accessibility is an important topic because it allows people with disabilities to have equal access to the same information, products, and services as those without disabilities. This includes access to the internet, transportation, buildings, and other public accommodations. By making sure that websites, documents, and other materials are accessible to people with disabilities, we can help to create a more inclusive society where everyone has the opportunity to participate fully. Accessibility can also benefit people who do not have disabilities, such as those who are elderly, who may have temporary injuries or impairments, or who may be using a device or software that is not fully compatible with a particular website or document.

Therefore, I was very excited and also happy, when in both 2021 and 2022, was asked to participate as an organizer for Morgan Stanley’s Accessibility Design Day. It is being organized as part of the disAbility Awareness Month, together with the Americas Culture of Inclusion Committee, and it is a global all-day event for teams to innovate and to challenge themselves to think in a new way to improve UX and interaction patterns across many types of applications. In 2021, 44, and in 2022, 54 engineers and technologists participated, working in teams of 2-8, collaborating on innovative ideas to make our applications and technologies more accessible to clients and employees with vision, hearing or cognitive impairment. The 10 teams dispersed across the world worked together on the day on a demo ready proof of concept which was presented to an esteemed panel of internal and external judges, who are advocates of the accessibility community. Solutions ranged from enhanced support responses from our chatbots, one- and two-way voice interfaces, captions and transcripts, immersive screen readers, accessible augmented reality solutions and custom data visualizations.

(Yes, I am wearing my http://finos.org hoody :D)

The Morgan Stanley Technology Expo in 2022

Posted on January 6, 2023 by Peter Smulovics

Every year (of course, not during the pandemic years), Morgan Stanley does a Technology Expo, with a growing number of presentations, booths and locations. This is an amazing event, with thousands of participants, hundreds of booths, more than a dozen locations, clearly one of a kind. And – 2022 wasn’t in anyway different; and so, the submission period began. I submitted multiple booth proposals, multiple tech talk proposals, etc., and then waited for the results for weeks 🙂

When the results were announced, I got flabbergasted – first learned the number of booths I got: 6 different booths! Topics were: 2 locations to talk about the Metaverse, 1 location to talk about a technology called DOM Projection that we plan to open source in the near future, 1 location to talk about our use of WebView2 (see https://youtu.be/8y3ZCzw3LtA on public details about that), 1 location to talk about our new usage statistics methods, and one location to talk about our use of server side middleware and our original, 10+ year old solution for the service mesh. And I thought that’s it, when the news came out, that there is a 7th, special booth to be taken over too – this one very different, one of the 5 special booths to be visited by the Morgan Stanley board! And the topic – a new way to experience Art, via virtual reality! The firm’s global headquarters, 1585 Broadway was the location for the latter. The large and expansive lobby and cafeteria got converted into the marquee showrooms for the day – a tall and stately white squarely structure set in the heart of the lobby, could be hardly missed. The structure itself was open on all sides, inviting everyone to a showcase of the special selected projects. The projects themselves were a preview into the Morgan Stanley technology story, told through the lens of solutions designed for our firm, our clients, our people and our future. And it was the center of the booth, a Metaverse experience introducing the attendees to a virtual reality tour of our Art collection, that was served by me and the team, that was the great introduction to the New York event and a perfect teaser into the central hub of the technology expo.

But the list of surprises was far from finished. As I was eagerly preparing for all the different booths and topics, it dawned on me that I haven’t yet checked the tech talks – and yes, I got a tech talk too! It took me 2 more days to figure out that I got not one tech talk, rather 3 out of the 15 showed 😀 Namely:

Welcome to the Metaverse! – my talk about explaining the last 6 years’ projects and achievements in the Metaverse space
ServiceMesh is the New Thing! Or is it? – my talk explaining how the ServiceMesh concept has been around for over a decade although we never named it as such
Where does desktop development go and why should I be interested? – my talk explaining the new concepts of desktop development, why there is still a value in WPF Core, and how does hybrid applications demonstrate the best of both worlds (it’s in the name 😀 )

Sadly, I cannot really share more than this, the title and the short description of my booths and tech talks for now; and this picture from the company’s LinkedIn page:

We recently hosted our Global Technology Expo in 15 Morgan Stanley locations around the globe. Over ten days, more than 600 technologists exhibited over 300 products and cutting-edge initiatives and solutions to stakeholders throughout the firm, and illustrated the ways we are leveraging technology for good. “The Global Tech Expo is an excellent opportunity to showcase the products we develop in support of our clients and employees,” said Peter Akwaboah, COO Technology and Head of Innovation. “Through showcasing our innovations at the Expo, we can spur conversations across the firm about important topics like the future of work and cybersecurity.” — Myself on the Morgan Stanley LinkedIn page – Morgan Stanley LinkedIn

Morgan Stanley at the Open Source in Finance Forum NY’22

Posted on January 5, 2023 by Peter Smulovics

As you saw in the previous post, Open Source in Finance Forum NY’22 | Dotneteers.net, I was at the Open Source Finance Forum, representing the Open Source Readiness and leading the discussion on the Open Source Program Office’s private session. But I wasn’t the only person present at the event from Morgan Stanley – we have had a wide range of presence from our side this time:

My manager, Dov Katz, was part of the opening Keynote:

Open Source in Finance Forum – Opening Remarks – Gabriele Columbro, with Dov Katz & Rob Moffatt

My coworkers, Stephen Goldbaum and Rita Chaturvedi leading multiple discussions at the event:

The Current State of DEI and Path Forward – Jevon Beckles, Chitra Hota, Nick Fuller, Rita Chaturvedi

Exploring Open Reg Tech with the LCR – Stephen Goldbaum

Modernize Regulatory Reporting: Get Ready for T+1 Settlement

Morphir Integration with Scala – Damian Reeves, Stephen Goldbaum

So, I am looking forward to 2023’s OSFF events, hopefully being able to present once again on them with some fun topics 🙂

Open Source in Finance Forum NY’22

Posted on January 4, 2023 by Peter Smulovics

After presenting at the 2021 version of the Forum, it was inevitable that I want to be back – it was an energizing experience and wanted to feel it once again! 🙂

So, I submitted a topic (open source standardizing for the metaverse), and waited for the green light – which never came; this was a topic seemingly too early to be discussed on such forums – I am a firm believer in mixed reality and open source, so it is just the question of time to have interest for such 🙂

But I had a way back – for the first time ever, OSFF matured enough that to have next to the multiple tracks with amazing sessions, they added an EXPO!

11 of FINOS’s own projects, the Common Domain Model, the Compliance Horizon Scanning, the DevOps Automation, FDC3, Financial Objects, KDB+, Morphir, Open Source Maturity Model, Symphony Workflow Developer Kit, Timebase and the Open Source Readiness SIG were joined by the sponsor’s booths, resulting in a huge influx of people between the sessions and during the longer breaks to check out what we can show – I took this picture before the first big hit of people arrived, because after that I never had the time to take another 🙂 :

So, how this is relevant to me? Because I happen to be the co-chair the Open Source Readiness SIG, along with the amazing Elspeth Minty of RBC, Care Delia of Red Hat and Brittany Istenes of Fannie Mae, with the huge help of Rob Moffat, Jim St Clair and the energy bomb James McLeod. Even more – as the co-hair, I got to lead the FINOS Banks Only OSPO Roundtable. As the event is run according to Chatham rules, I cannot tell much more details about the roundtable beside the anonymized meeting notes at GitHub.

For the Win – with Weight Loss Advertising?

Posted on January 3, 2023 by Peter Smulovics

As I mentioned in the year start post, I’ll avoid doing weight loss advertising. Still, I start the year with a memento for myself on the topic 😀

So, look at these two pictures – both of them are me, one year apart, at the beginning of the pandemic. I was one of the few who did a weight loss then and there.

So, what’s the situation now? Due to many things that happened between then and now, I managed to sadly gain most of the kilos back 🙁 But, not further!

With the help of both the Les Mills Facebook group’s motivation, the on-demand app and the new Oculus app, I plan to become the better me, once again 🙂

New year – new schedule!

Posted on December 31, 2022 by Peter Smulovics

Ok, this blog recently did not receive much of love – ok, self-honesty, none -, but will try to change this for 2023 at least somewhat up 🙂 As usual, the number of ideas overwhelm the number of minutes. So, what I plan to write about? Weight loss advertising? 😀 Most probably not. Topics about the metaverse, open source, software, architecture, software architecture, conferences, and more is hoped to show up here from time to time 🙂

Another Session on “Why Going Open Source?” – Peter Smulovics, Morgan Stanley

Posted on February 11, 2022 by Peter Smulovics

Back in November, I had the luck and opportunity to get back to some level of normalcy for just a day – I got invited to present at Linux Foundation’s Open Source Strategy Forum about, wait for it, Open Source. What was it about? Here is the blurb:

It is always appropriate to challenge the need for a project to be open source, given the lack of foreknowledge of anyone else having a desire to use a platform versus the other possible options or their own proprietary one. While companies have the desire and the capability to support this if it comes to be, it’s not the primary motivation. With a foundational architectural aspiration of a pluggable platform, it’s important for it to be possible to selectively choose components from open source and if needed, from commercial vendors that make sense given your requirements. There is no reason for a company to own every line of code or to find something available that tries to meet all the needs. Vendors will always yearn to get their foot in the door and being open source accelerates and simplifies partnerships through increased visibility and collaboration without the red/yellow tape or proprietary integrations or NDAs. We have already seen this model work successfully with our projects as ongoing collaborative efforts with vendors to use and extend simply for their own (sales) demos to others.

So, without further ado, here is the recording:

Another Session on “Why Going Open Source?” – Peter Smulovics, Morgan Stanley

The success of this presentation lead to another small success – more about that later on 🙂

Arriving to… Crossroads

Posted on August 4, 2021 by Peter Smulovics

And another project just got opensourced by my team, this being called ‘Crossroads‘. It is a small nifty tool that enables to do something similar as self contained .NET Core applications are making possible – just this supporting other technologies than .NET Core, like Node.js applications or applications using more than one technology.

Crossroads itself is a .NET Core commandline tool, a kind of packager for developers. As mentioned above, this is a generic solution to host any application within Crossroads package executable and further launches application’s executable. Developers will specify arguments such as name, icon, version etc. for branding during the package generation. The specified argument name will be used to rebrand the internal application as needed.

So, in a nutshell, Crossroads allows you to:

create an executable package
customize your package with a name, icon, version and other attributes
run applications through crossroads generated package

Generating… non-documentation

Posted on July 21, 2021 by Peter Smulovics

In the last few days I got involved in an interesting question – if you to have an internal conference with 250 presenters, multiple timeslots, live sessions, recordings, materials and more – and you need to create a website for it, what would you do?

One of the obvious choices is to write a custom app for it, has a database (document db or graph db or something similar NOSQL), a 2/3 tier architecture, etc. Or… if I’m anyway trying to understand the options around document generation, I could generate the website from some lousy excel sheets and upload to a CMS that would handle commenting and links and similar.

So I did the latter, using a little bit of XLSX parsing, use of good old Apache (N)Velocity (currently maintained by the Castle team), a little bit of window dressing and figuring out some stupid limitations around transposing arrays with double nested loops using the Velocity language, and:

Blurred image of a generated project page

Please, let me introduce

Posted on July 7, 2021 by Peter Smulovics

Another day – another open source project from my team, this time a small nifty tool called “please”, akin something that already been mentioned in one of the ADRs (ADR003):

- We would depend on using an eng/Dependencies.props file instead of having the versions of Nuget files repeatedly entered into the csproj files - We would use automated tooling to achieve the maintenance of Dependencies.props file

So, in the end, not only these, but a bunch of other small functionality has been added to this swiss knife of a tool that you can just ask to do stuff, nicely 🙂

It can easily:

Consolidate nuget packages across a solution, or only a subset of them
Keep package versions in a central props file and maintain that file
Move and rename projects
Clean up in case you manually moved and renamed
Clean up <Compile Remove="..." /> items, with or without globbing
To find stray projects
To remove ‘junk’ from solution directory
To change the PATH variable (useful when working with dotnet tools)
etc.