I am Victor Grazi, platform architect at Credit Suisse Investment Bank.
I started life as a math snob - it was pure math for me - the only numbers in my math book were the page numbers! Mr. Isidore Glaubiger was my professor at Brooklyn Tech HS and he taught me to think with a casual rigor that has served me well over the past 40 something years. He was one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century. Should have belonged to the world but was happy to breed geniuses in just a lone high school.
Computers then were quite different then from what we imagine today, and we had a 2 room computer lab at Tech - 1 room for the computer (a PDP10) and the punch cards, and another room for the rest of the class. That was how I learned Fortran.
I moved on to Syracuse University - not much to report there, it was a lot of fun and so while everyone was out partying, I was borrowing their computer time, where I learned APL.
I have been in Java development since early 1996. The internet was just starting to happen then, and I started a .com called Supermarkets to Go, with my brother Harry Grazi. I wrote pretty much the whole code, which was a great learning experience for Swing, as well as database management (I remember the first time I did a bulk upload to MS SQL Server, I left it running overnight and when I awoke it was only 30% done loading 50,000 records! You need to learn quick what switches to pull!
I graduated in 76 and married a year later. When the honeymoon ended I got my first job, working in our family manufacturing business. I really started getting into the computer at that point - I was good at programming, and it was much more attractive than hitting the streets with a sample case.
That deteriorated as most family business do, and I joined my brother in law in a children's wear import company on January 1, 1988 (I went to work on New Years day!) I stayed there until around 1993 when I started my own import company. Money ran out and I raised money to start a new venture.
Supermarkets to Go's exit strategy was to IPO for a few hundred million. That dream burst just about the time the .com bubble burst. So I started working on the server side at PrizePoint, the first on-line gaming company. They were taken over by Uproar and went public. I watched my 11000 options at 10 cents per share turn into 11000 shares at $4 per share. That doubled in value every week until they spilt 2 for 1 and finally jumped all the way to 52. I was a millionaire! Problem was I could not sell. A year later, when I finally did sell, the shares did a nose dive. I listened to my wife and sold at for $8/share.
That was the first job where I was not working for myself, and I was still immature about corporate politics, and I was still green as a developer, having had no real formal training, beyond a few courses in HS and College on Fortran and IBM Assembly.
I left that and went to work at Bank of NY building a trading system. I had studied for Java certification at that point, and although I don't put much faith in certification generally, I found that to be a game changer because I really started to learn the nuances of the language.
At BNY I became the lead developer, but I started to outgrow the job and eventually moved to Caxton associates. Let me tell you about Hedge Funds - they treat software development like an arbitrage cover - get it done, and fast! Well, in my few years as a developer I learned good discipline and good process, and the rush rush, no time for testing and no QA did not suit me at all.
I needed to shore up my JEE skills, so I took a spot at Starpoint Associates, where I put together a team of developers and delivered a distribution management system (based on IBM WebSphere) to manage the distribution of their credit card solicitations. You may have noticed that you don't get as much junk mail from Citibank as you used to - that is thanks to my project.
That gave me good experience managing a team and working on JEE, so I was ready for the big time. I moved on to Credit Suisse in 2005
I was initially hired as a developer, but my boss moved on after a year and I took over leading the team. We were building the next generation of their Value Search company valuation software - great project - it was kind of a formula browser, where our analysts entered the financial models and a user could go in to the application and see charts and make buy/sell decisions. There's nothing else like it in the market.
In 2011, staff started reducing and I was getting nervous - who needed a lead developer if there was no one to lead!
I was developing a relationship with Mr. Eric Newcomer, an inspired gentlemen who is an out of the box thinker in a milieu that scorns out of the box thinking. Eric was the chief architect at the investment banks, and he invited me to join the central architecture team, and there I remain.
in 2012 I was inducted into the Java Champions program. I also serve on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process, representing Credit Suisse - the first non-technology vendor on the JCP (Goldman Sachs is now a member as well).
I am quite proud of my open source project, Java Concurrent Animated. It has afforded me the opportunity to do many speaking engagements, and I have discovered that I really enjoy doing public presentations.
I also arrange the NY Java SIG meetings at Credit Suisse each month and that has been a valuable networking opportunity.