Tag Archives: morgan stanley

What can I thank the Technology Analyst Program for?

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Since I joined, I have been a huge fan and supporter of the ‘TAP’ program at the firm. It is not something unheard of – new joiners, fresh from their studies, before joining the workforce, do participate in a 14-week program, that gives them both a base in general programming, refreshing their knowledge, but also contains important building blocks related to the various ‘morganizations’ (about this in a later post probably :D) we have, so when you would be on your day 1 in your actual day-to-day role, many of the technologies you would be faced with would be familiar to you. The program is a big success, 100s of young talents are joining through it every year – in 2022, over 400 of them! So big of a success, that many cases lateral hired talents feel left out that they are not getting the same treatment 🙂 Oh, and as an extra benefit, your picture is displayed on the side of the actual Morgan Stanley HQ building on Times Square – and there is a camera feed in case you cannot visit it 🙂

One of the big aspects of it as I mentioned is getting familiar with the company specific technologies. This is helped through 3 different aspects at the same time. As part of the normal, day-to-day curriculum, some special blocks are designated to be about these specialized technologies, like how our messaging bus works or how you can connect to the firmwide directory – these sessions are generally proctored by my team; me included. Shouldn’t come as a surprise, I cover mostly C# and .NET as part of it 🙂 The second way you get more involved in the firm specific technology is through an ‘architecture exercise’. You are given a relatively complex problem, involving many moving parts written in different languages (C++, Java, C#, Python, etc) and techniques (message bus, file shares, etc) that you need to implement and would get scored (oh yes, everything as part of the program gets scored – you get many homework assignments, labs, etc that you need to execute well to be able to graduate).

Lastly, is the part that in some way is the most exciting for me, which is the project work at the end. Out of the 14 weeks, only 10 is spent according to the above – the last 4 is special and spent in smaller, 3-4 person groups, which are tasked with a project that was pre-vetted by the TAP organizing team and was submitted by the developer and business communities (because not just developers are in this program; there are separate tracks for engineers and business analysts too). I am now standing with the most successful projects ever title at the firm – more than 30 projects in the last 12+ years. So, you might ask, what kind of projects would I have? Let me share some summary of the projects of 2022:

  • Had two different projects related to Augmented Reality – one for finding people and locations in the office; another one for finding equipment in a data center
  • Had a project related to Electron, the UI Container, to make our open source project, desktopJS (morganstanley.com), to work with the newer version of Electron
  • Had a project which hopefully would be able to open source one day, which is providing personally identifiable information masking in open telemetry
  • Had a project building a realtime dashboard for server health specifically for applications using one particular application framework
  • Had a project on creating the new conferencing website for the firm, so people can get to this information easier

Looking forward to what 2023 brings related to projects and my involvement in the Technology Analyst Program – in the last 3 years I maintained their internal website too, using the techniques explained at Generating… non-documentation | Dotneteers.net

Accessibility Design Day’22 and ’21

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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

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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

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

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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

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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

Going opensource – why?

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Small update on Ok, so, where is the project? added as a separate post 🙂

I suppose you haven’t spotted yet – we just created a new opensource project, GitHub – morganstanley/Compose . It might worth explaining the why behind that choice.

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 we 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 our 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 other projects like desktopJS as ongoing collaborative efforts with vendors to use and extend simply for their own (sales) demos to others. While it is naïve to think they aren’t also doing this to make it easier for us to choose their platform. It has proven the usefulness of open source being successful in other ways than just marketing, recruiting or reuse by others. It is also a tool to better work with the industry to outsource or “buy” features off the shelf that give a commercial momentum with faster delivery. Having this project in the open is also useful to drive the roadmap of some companies by adding use cases that finserv developers need and expect.

Open source also provides us with innovative methods to explore different avenues of staff augmentation – e.g. working in an open manner eliminates the onboarding needs as well as associated overhead resulting in immediate participation and contribution.

A tangential benefit of being open source is keeping us free of binding ourselves unnecessarily to internal tooling and processes and implementation. By using off the shelf build infrastructure and GitHub capabilities we will be able to swiftly adopt and leverage industry leading DevOps tooling.

So what does open source mean to me? Whether you are operating on the cloud or on premises, you want to spend most of your time on solving the business problems in front of you, not on re-inventing the wheel of algorithms, APIs, pipelines, deployment and so on. Fortunately, we get to stand on the shoulders of giants by relying on robust well-maintained open source libraries or specialized vendor software, when appropriate. Most of the popular modern solutions work equally well on the cloud and in an internal infrastructure. In our view, .NET developers should be working on problems that are critical to the functioning of the company, and it’s the job of projects like this one to enable that focus by providing the functional foundational building blocks. We do help finding and creating the robust solutions to the generic problems so practitioners can remain focused on the aspects that are specific to their business. By developing battle tested code, harnessing the brain power within the OSS community and building relationship with selected vendors, we are able to provide the best-in-class tools and libraries for all .NET Developers. This amounts to less custom code scattered across, that becomes a technical debt, and results in an easier learning curve for anyone joining a firm – like ours.

Where customizations are required of other OSS projects, we promote contributing those changes back to the project on the firm’s behalf – this is in line with the overall firmwide OSS strategy.

We are doing .NET Core – .NET Core itself is a fairly young technology and the usage of it is also at the very beginning of its journey. Our mission, our approach and our thinking will evolve as .NET Core adoption matures and as the subject itself evolves. This will always be a collaborative effort and we do invite input from all of our constituents. This input allows us to be better informed and to better understand the needs of practitioners around the world. My group, my team will strive to be a resource for .NET Core expertise on desktop, cloud, software, vendor needs, advanced techniques, academic research and related topics. But for this, we need to go open source 🙂

Morgan Stanley at Microsoft //Build’21

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After having our logo up last year and being talked about, and being showed as part of the 2014 Build keynote (What kept me busy recently #4), this year we would be again part of //Build – this time my manager, Dov Katz is going to be interviewed by Ben Walters, we even got a real aka.ms vanity URL, http://aka.ms/msbuild_morganstanley 🙂 Beside this, it’s expected that even I’d show up for a short segment speaking about the WebView2 journey as part of MyBuild – Microsoft Edge: State of the platform 🙂 And as above, Dov as part of MyBuild – Morgan Stanley joins Customer Tech Talks to discuss operating at the speed of international finance with WebView2.