Machine Learning

The amount of data that gets generated by companies is continuously growing – the term “Big Data” is commonly used to describe this, whether it is multiple financial transactions per second, thousands of emails per day or a million hours of video content in YouTube. This brings about a good amount of new challenges (more…)

Developing Secure Systems

Sinara has been developing leading financial solutions for over 25 years, and throughout that time, the need to develop secure systems has been a constant. While requirements and technologies change over time, the financial sector has always recognised the importance of client confidentiality and information security, and cybersecurity concerns have been increasingly scrutinised in the […]

SignalR Coding Best Practices

ASP.NET SignalR is a library for adding real-time web functionality to applications. It allows server-side code to push content to connected clients as it happens, in real-time. We are seeing more and more SignalR applications come along. Whether it is the preferred technology or not, I think most .NET web-app developers will have to get comfortable […]

Unit Testing: A Personal View

When I started my career as a software developer over 30 years ago the waterfall model was the main game in town and my role was module design, code and unit test. The design was “Structured”, the coding language Z80 Assembler and C, but the unit tests? Well to be honest, unit testing was just […]

Dynamically Generating Excel Workbooks

Recently, developers here at Sinara have built a number of applications that have involved dynamically generating large numbers of Excel spreadsheets from database tables. In some cases, the spreadsheets had simple layouts, with just raw numbers in cells, whilst others had more sophisticated formatting and charts. In addition to the core functionality, the performance of the […]

Supporting ‘problem’ IT systems

We all know that when looking at the lifetime of any software project, that the longest phase is support and maintenance. It’s the unglamorous, but highly important task of keeping the system running and often changing it to fit in with changing business or technical requirements. Larger organisations with well-developed project processes normally plan this […]

FISD Exam Success

Having told everybody we meet that Sinara are experts in IT systems for Financial Market Data, we decided to put this to the test by getting one of our consultants to take the FISD’s Financial Information Associate (FIA) exam. We’re delighted that our consultant Hamish Adourian has passed the exam with flying colours so can […]

Sinara add citi-cats data to market data platform

As online brokers seek new services and opportunities to provide for their clients, some look to the various off-exchange venues to distinguish themselves. As a supplier of a market data platform, (SinaraMDP) it is important for Sinara to be able to adapt to these new data demands, by having a software design that is flexible enough […]

Welcome to the Sinara Consultants blog

Welcome to the Sinara Consultants blog. This is where we will be sharing news about interesting things we are working on plus opinions and commentary on technical and business issues that impact the daily lives of the Sinara team and our clients. As 2014 is Sinara’s 25th anniversary, we’ll also be including some articles and […]