Last July 8th we hosted our second meet up. The announced topics were Testing and Regulations, however the event was mostly testing. In a way, it has been very exciting to organise it, mainly because of some last-minute changes that affected the whole program. In fact, one of the speaker was sick and could not attend, and on top of that a few unexpected technical problems arose at the MixTup venue as well. Eventually everything worked fine and all the efforts made during the few days and hours before the event contributed to the success of the evening.

The chairman of the event was my colleague Jorrit-Jaap de Jong (Ugly Duckling), who entertained the audience, introduced the speakers, and reminded everybody of the purposes of the FEN evenings (which you can read in the ad of our introductory meeting here). The two talks were essentially on testing. The first speaker was our financial engineer Michele Maio (Ugly Duckling) who introduced various testing techniques and good practices such as test driven development and automated testing (mostly focusing on Excel and FitNesse). Michele used the programming language C#. The second speaker was Mert Aybat (Connectis). Mert had an extremely nice "live" and interactive presentation on how to use Mocks when testing complicated projects with many dependencies, and he definitely showed his competence in testing. Mert used Java and Mockito as tools of choice.

The crowd present to the meeting also deserves some comment. Besides the people who attended our first meeting, we were happy to see many new faces who joined this second event, coming both from the software and the finance industries.  They all stimulated the discussions that arose during the presentations: thanks to them the flow of information was not in one direction only.

What will happen in the future?

It is important for us to keep track of what we want to achieve and what the FEN events are all about, namely: sharing knowledge, creating an intellectual stimulating environment, meeting like-minded people, discussing trends and hot topics in finance, and networking. In order to move forward, events are planned every couple of month, and the next one will be in autumn when everybody is back from summer vacations. We will keep the current format, which has been successful so far: hosting two talks within an informal environment with topics related to software, finance, and financial engineering.

Requests

To make the FEN community larger, it is crucial that everybody is active. That's why we would like to reminder everybody that anybody is welcome to join. Moreover, as Jorrit mentioned during this event:

• we are always looking for speakers, so if anybody is interested to talk at next event please let us know;
• we are also looking for locations, so if anybody would like to organise the next event with use by booking a seminar room in his/her bank or institution please let us know;
• we are always looking forward to growing our community, so please share it with your network.