Because no-one else is, as far as I know.  I'm sure I could have benefitted from this sort of forum many times in the past, and I'm sure it could still be very useful, if we could get an active community going.

There's no doubt that Fidessa is a specialist and complex subject, and there didn't seem to be anywhere formal to discuss the sorts of challenges that we come across with Fidessa.

Well, there is now!

I want a place to discuss issues, find out information and interact with my peers.

I could find any number of general purpose programming, sysadmin or finance business-related forums, but I could find nothing that addressed our specialist industry.

Finally, I have given loads of advice away for nothing over the years; too bad for me, I have one of those helpful and sharing personalities.  I know for sure that some of this advice has saved days or even weeks of wasted effort, some has helped people build their reputations.  I'd like some recognition for that - perhaps I'm not the only one in that situation?

If we can stimulate some active debates and help each other out from time-to-time, I think it has great potential to raise the quality of what we produce, provide better value for our business.

You have the opportunity here to become better informed, get advice and validation for your decisions and become generally more effective in your industry.

(If you don't think it's a good idea to produce better results at work, you won't find any value here!)

I first joined royalblue financial PLC in December 1997 (that's 11 years ago at the time of writing), as part of the implementation team.

I haven't worked on Fidessa exclusively in all that time - if I added up all the time directly spent on Fidessa, it would be something like 8 or 9 years.

That's for others to judge, but here are a few things that you might think are distinctive:

• I've spent a lot of time at the bleeding edge; I have never sat around keeping a system "ticking over".  Every Fidessa assignment I have worked on has contained at least one significant "first", whether it was developing Fidessa's first Windows-based order/ trade/ allocation entry objects, putting the very first ToSTNet (Tokyo), EuroNext (Brussels and Amsterdam) connections live, or provding the first complete support for Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean charge calculation, served out of a single hub in Hong Kong.
• I am an odd mixture of software developer and implementation specialist.  This means I understand databases properly, for example, and I know simple stuff about making code efficient, that some others seem to miss.  People with direct experience of Fidessa know that there is a noticeable difference in the quality of consultants who understand software development, versus those who don't.  I am still surprised how common it is to find people who don't fully appreciate the consequences of the way they architect their Fidessa modifications.
• I have been trusted to work remotely from New Zealand, first in 2001-2002 and for the last 4 years.  In my most recent assignment, I was the longest-standing Fidessa consultant on that project, and the joint last to be dropped, despite being the most expensive by far (charged out via Fidessa).  I outlasted numerous other consultants, many of whom were labelled "senior".

You can adjust the screen width using the little bars at the very top of the screen, near the right hand side

Click the right-most button (Fluid width) to make maximum use of your screen 

Other than working on Fidessa, I have:

• designed electronic control systems for military and commercial aircraft
• designed embededd hardware and software (in C and assembler) for smartcard terminals, for access control, electronic payments etc
• developed point-of-sale software in c++ on Windows and DOS (yes, in 1999!), including a nifty "virtual device driver" for NT, that allowed the DOS application to access hardware, when there were no DOS drivers available.  Raw, man.
• written and modified some standalone applications for specialist businesses, including a few Visual Basic apps, using Microsoft SQL Server, and some other technologies I cringe to even think about.
• designed and developed an exchange simulator, using MySQL and some interesting Java frameworks, like Spring and Hibernate

I was born and raised in England.  Now I have both British and New Zealand citizenship.

This can be very handy, as it means I can work in Europe, Australia and New Zealand indefinitely, without any special visas, as well the relatively easy access to working visas in other countries, that these passports provide.

I have worked in London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Brussels, Hong Kong and Auckland for extended periods.

Of course, I travelled elsewhere for specific projects, such as Australia, Singapore and the USA.