[ Fer-Martin ] (Re)invent your life every day

Quick Facts.

Singapore is a small island in the South of Malaysia (Google maps), with an area of 700km² (just a bit bigger than Andorra) is the home for 4.5M Singaporeans.

There are 4 official languages including English or Singlish- and Mandarin. In fact, this is a really convenient aspect of Singapore, since it is one of the few countries in Asia where almost everybody can speak English (Hong Kong as well).

Singapore, until 1963 was a colony of Great Britain and the influence of such period remains in many aspects of the country. I has also a great Indian, Chinese and Malasyan culture

The currency is Singaporean Dollars (SGD), and currently the exchange rate is 1S$≈￥75 - 2S$≈1€. One cool thing about Singapore money, is that the new notes are made of a special polymer that makes them almost unbreakable (info).

It is considered the second biggest Financial Hub of Asia (after Hong Kong - UN Article) and ranks second in the world based on the Index of Economic Freedom (The Heritage Foundation Article).

Singapore from my eyes

Singapore is a really cool place to be. Commonly known as “Asia for beginners”, it’s quite easy to find your own space here. There are several communities living in harmony (Malay, Chinese, Indian and Expats) which makes the city quite cosmopolitan.

This Service-oriented city is an ideal place for you to spend holidays or work. I’ve been only some weeks here and I feel that there is so many things to do that the only thing missing is time!

Someone recently defined Singapore as “A big theme park where East meets West”, and I can’t agree more. Living here is very simple, full of things to do and with an extremely high quality of life.

My Apartment in Singapore

Let me try and brief you on things you can do in Singapore if you come here:

• Little India. Enjoy the craziness of India in its purest essence. Lots of great places to eat on Banana Leaf, jewelry shops, cheap stuff and a great atmosphere 24/7. Try “Mustafa Center” for great bargains!
• Chinatown. You can see the Chinese temples, cheap food, tea houses and typical Chinese atmosphere. There are also plenty of Food markets and shops to go around until very late at night.
• Colonial Areas. Relaxing and luxury areas that once belonged to the British Empire are still conserved intact. It’s best to be seeing during daylight and it has many green areas to rest and enjoy.
• Botanic Gardens. With the biggest Orchid garden in the world, is a wonderful place not to be missed. It has also a couple of good restaurants for a romantic dinner in the evenings. Sometimes you can enjoy concerts and activities as well.
• Sentosa. Resort island with plenty of beaches and things to do. It has the biggest laser aqua show in the world, dolphin show, cafe del mar, km8 beach party and many many things!
• National parks. Singapore has almost 25% of its land of forest and natural parks. The one i recommend the most is the Night Safari, which is close to the Zoo in the north, and it is a wonderful experience if you like animals.
• Night life. The keyword in Singapore for you to remember is Clarke Quay. It’s a quay right in the middle of CBD which holds a lot of parties every single day of the week. One of the main attractions is Ministry of Sound (video1, video2), although there is enough choice for you to jump from one place to another until satisfied. Another great place to party is Cafe del Mar (video)and KM-8 (video1, video2), both in Sentosa. Well, enough said for now.

Little India

Chinatown

Colonial District. Raffle’s Hotel

Botanic Gardens

Sentosa

Because a video is worth a thousand pictures…

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to give you a quick summary of my life since the last update. Sorry to all of you who patiently waited for this blog to (re)start again! I will do my very best to give you high quality contents that inspire you and make you think.

Well, lets start this update with a brief explanation about my professional experiences since last year. After this post, i will continue with more personal stuff and other interesting things that have happened to me this last year.

Nikko Citigroup

Well, as you may know, last June (2007) I started working for Fusion Systems in Japan as an Associate Consultant. Shortly after, I had my first opportunity to work on-site for Nikko Citigroup in Tokyo.

My first project (June07 - Nov07) was to help Nikko Citigroup (Business Technology Organization - BTO) to improve their Software Configuration Management. This is basically all the different processes they must follow from the moment they start writting code, until it is succesfully deployed into production.

We analyzed the software lifecycle’s procedures for all the applications currently in production, defined a unified method to be compliant with Audit Risk Review’s global standards and help them migrate all the applications into this new system.

One really good thing about this project is that I could interview all development teams in Japan for both Equities and Fixed Income, as well as teams in New York or Singapore.

My first experience with Citibank was very positive, not only because of all the exposure to financial systems, but also because I met really wonderful and talented people working there.

EMC - Citigroup

Last December, I was required to move to Singapore for a joint project with EMC (info). The client was again Citibank (info), but now the Singapore branch.

EMC is one of the biggest information infrastructure technology companies in the world, and they offer a very wide variety of products. Two of the biggest products are Symmetrix DMX (an extremely fast enterprise storage array) and Centera (Content Addressable Storage system).

Centera is used commonly to store massive ammounts of documents (that do not change often) in an archive system with a fast time response (compared to jukebox or tape). This is useful in more environments that I initially imagined:

• Security videos
• Voice message systems
• Official Contracts
• Government documentation
• and many many more areas…

Thanks to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Public Company Account Reform and Investor Protection Act, or SOX), all electronic communications are to be recorded for a period of time (typically years) for compliance purposes. This made Investment banks an important target of EMC and all Storage Infrastructure companies. I recommend a very good article about Why SOX matters in China if you are interested in the topic.

My project is to build a Cache System that increases the performance when reading or writting to Centera. I designed a C/C# application that interfaces with Citibank current systems and delivers Centera content with a substantial increase in speed.

Future Steps…

I will be in Singapore until early March finishing up the project and overviewing the deployment issues that might arise on production. After that I will return to Tokyo and continue with other projects there.

Guys, it’s a pleasure to be back