Technological Thoughts by Jerome Kehrli
Following this post on linkedin, I thought that I could share one of my own experiences. A fairly senior developer had an idea for a new product and spent a couple of weeks vibe-coding it. Hundreds of prompts, lots of iterative .md plans and in the end more than half a hundred thousands of lines of code produced in a surprisingly short time. When the project reached (what was deemed) a first…
These two books form a single, coherent journey through computing, from the physical reality of machines to the abstract ideas that define computation and intelligence. L'informatique – Des transistors aux microservices explores how computers are built and why modern systems look the way they do, starting with electricity and transistors and rising through operating systems, networks, cloud…
I spoke to to Rudolf Falat , founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast about leveraging AI in anti-fraud prevention and cybersecurity. The Podcast is available here and can be listened to directly from hereunder: Happy listening ! The full transcript is available hereunder
For forty years we have been building Information Systems in corporations in the same way, with the same architecture, with very little innovations and changes in paradigms: On one side the Operational Information System which sustains day-to-day operations and business activities. On the Operational Information Systems, the 3-tiers architecture and the relational database model (RDBMS -…
(Article initially published on NetGuardians' blog ) NetGuardians overcomes the problems of analyzing billions of pieces of data in real time with a unique combination of technologies to offer unbeatable fraud detection and efficient transaction monitoring without undermining the customer experience or the operational efficiency and security in an enterprise-ready solution. When it comes to data…
A proposed framework for Agile Roadmap Design and Maintenance --> In my current company, we embrace agility down the line, from the Product Management Processes and approaches down to the Software Development culture. However, from the early days and due to the nature of our activities, we understood that we had two quite opposed objectives: on one side the need to be very flexible and change…
(Article initially published on NetGuardians' blog ) Whenever our software is run head-to-head in a pitch situation against that of our rivals, we always come out top. We always find more fraud with a lower number of alerts. For some, this is a surprise – after all, we are one of the youngest companies in our field and one of the smallest. To us, it is no surprise. It is testament to our superior…
Well. For once this will be an article far away from the kind of stuff I use to post on this blog. This is a post about COVID-19 and its vaccines. But it's perhaps the most important thing I will have ever written. Since the start of the week, various events have cruelly reminded us of how dangerous COVID is. Particularly the situation in India, where infections are increasing at an absolutely…
The Search for Product-Market Fit is the sinews of war in a startup company. While the concept and whereabouts are well known by most founders, the importance of this event in the company and product building process, what it means to be Before-Product-Market-Fit and After-Product-Market-Fit and the fundamental differences in terms of objectives, processes, culture, activities, etc. between these…
Test Driven Development is a development practice from e X treme P rogramming which combines test-first development where you write a test before you write just enough production code to fulfill that test and refactoring . TDD aims to improve the productivity and quality of software development. It consists in jointly building the software and its suite of non-regression tests. The principle of…
Yesterday we were amazed by the first smartphones. Today they have almost become an extension of ourselves. People are now used to be connected all the time, with highly efficient devices on highly responsive services, everywhere and for every possible need. This is a new industrial revolution - the digitization . and it forces corporations to transform their business models to meet customers on…
In my current company, we implement a state-of-the art banking Fraud Detection system using an Artificial Intelligence running on a Big Data Analytics platform. When working on preventing banking fraud, looking at SWIFT messages is extremely interesting. 98% of all cross-border (international) funds transfers are indeed transferred using the SWIFT Network. The SWIFT network enables financial…
The world of fraud prevention in banking institutions has always been largely based on rules. Bankers and their engineers were integrating rules engines on the banking information system to prevent or detect most common fraud patterns. And for quite a long time, this was sufficient. But today we are experiencing a change of society, a new industrial revolution. Today, following the first iPhone…
The below is an extract from an interview I ran in February 2019 during the EPFL Forward event . NetGuardians is a Swiss Software Publisher based in Yverdon-les-bains that edits a Big Data Analytics Solution deployed Financial Institution for one key use case: fighting financial crime and preventing banking Fraud. Banking fraud is meant in the broad sense here: both internally and externally.…
The digitalization with its changes of means and behaviours and the induced society and industrial evolution is putting increasingly more pressure on banks. Just as if regulatory pressure and financial crisis weren't enough, banking institutions have realized that they need to transform the way they run their business to attract new customers and retain their existing ones. I detailed already this…
This is a collection of three videos I recorded for the "empowerment fundation" as part of their file on Artificial Intelligence . In parallel and in addition to BeCurious , the Empowerment Foundation launches in 2018 a project of curation files thematic through the bee² program. Taking up the practice of curating video content, bee² means: exploring the issues that build our world, expand the…
The Lambda Architecture, first proposed by Nathan Marz, attempts to provide a combination of technologies that together provide the characteristics of a web-scale system that satisfies requirements for availability, maintainability, fault-tolerance and low-latency. Quoting Wikipedia : " Lambda architecture is a data-processing architecture designed to handle massive quantities of data by taking…
In this article, I intend to present my company's - NetGuardians - approach when it comes to deploying Artificial Intelligence techniques towards better fraud detection and prevention. This article is inspired from various presentations I gave on the topic in various occasions that synthesize our experience in regards to how these technologies were initially triggering a lot of skepticism and…
I am presenting in this video NetGuardians' Big Data approach, technologies and its advantages for the banking institutions willing to deploy big data technologies for Fraud Prevention. (and video player) will replace this tag. --> The speech is reported in textual form hereafter.
Agility in Software Development is a lot of things, a collection of so many different methods. In a recent article I presented the Agile Landscape V3 from Christopher Webb which does a great job in listing these methods and underlying how much Agility is much more than some scrum practices on top of some XP principles. I really like this infographic since I can recover most-if-not-all of the…
The Bangladesh bank heist - or SWIFT attack - is one of the biggest bank robberies ever, and the most impressive cyber-crime in history . This is the story of a group of less than 20 cyber-criminals, composed by high profile hackers, engineers, financial experts and banking experts who gathered together to hack the worldwide financial system, by attacking an account of the central bank of…
So, finally the conclusion of this serie of three articles, the big conclusion, where I intend to present why this ELK-MS, ElasticSearch/LogStash/Kibana - Mesos/Spark, stack is cool. Without any more waiting, let's give the big conclusion right away, using ElasticSearch, Mesos and Spark can really distribute and scale the processing the way we want and very easily scale the processing linearly…
This article is the second article in my serie of two articles presenting the ELK-MS Stack and test cluster. ELK-MS stands for ElasticSearch/LogStash/Kibana - Mesos/Spark. The ELK-MS stack is a simple, lightweight, efficient, low-latency and performing alternative to the Hadoop stack providing state of the art Data Analytics features. ELK-MS is especially interesting for people that don't want to…
In my current company, we implement heavy Data Analytics algorithms and use cases for our customers. Historically, these heavy computations were taking a whole lot of different forms, mostly custom computation scripts in python or else using RDBMS databases to store data and results. A few years ago, we started to hit the limits of what we were able to achieve using traditional architectures and…
After writing my previous article , I wondered how I could represent on a single schematic all the Agile Principles and Practices from the methods I am following, XP, Scrum, Lean Startup, DevOps and others. I found that the approach I used in in a former schematic - a graph of relationship between practices - is not optimal. It already looks ugly with only a few practices and using the same…
All the work on Agility in the Software Engineering Business in the past 20 years, initiated by Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham and Ron Jeffries, comes from the finding that traditional engineering methodologies apply only poorly to the Software Engineering business. If you think about it, we are building bridges from the early stages of the Roman Empire, three thousand years ago. We are building heavy…
Following my first article on Bytecode manipulation with Javassist presented there: Bytecode manipulation with Javassist for fun and profit part I: Implementing a lightweight IoC container in 300 lines of code , I am here presenting another example of Bytecode manipulation with Javassist: generating toString method as well as property getters and setters with Javassist. While the former example…
A few weeks ago, I did a speech about the Digitalization and its impact on financial institutions, both in terms of challenges and opportunities in the context of my role as Head of R&D in my current company. I am reporting here my speech as an article. Even though the Digitalization and its impacts is something so widely discussed and studied nowadays, even in banking institutions, I still find…
I've seen this infographic from Christopher Webb at Deloitte (at the time) recently. This is the most brilliant infographic I've seen for years. Christopher Webb presents here a pretty extended set of Agile Practices associated to their respective frameworks . The practices presented are a collection of all Agile practices down the line, related to engineering but also management, product…
Java bytecode is the form of instructions that the JVM executes. A Java programmer, normally, does not need to be aware of how Java bytecode works. Understanding the bytecode, however, is essential to the areas of tooling and program analysis, where the applications can modify the bytecode to adjust the behavior according to the application's domain. Profilers, mocking tools, AOP, ORM frameworks,…