Signals and Threads

Swapping the Engine Out of a Moving Race Car with Ella Ehrlich

Episode Summary

Ella Ehrlich has been a developer at Jane Street for close to a decade. During much of that time, she’s worked on Gord, one of Jane Street’s oldest and most critical systems, which is responsible for normalizing and distributing the firm’s trading data. Ella and Ron talk about how to grow and modernize a legacy system without compromising uptime, why game developers are the “musicians of software,” and some of the work Jane Street has done to try to hire a more diverse set of software engineers.

Episode Notes

Ella Ehrlich has been a developer at Jane Street for close to a decade. During much of that time, she’s worked on Gord, one of Jane Street’s oldest and most critical systems, which is responsible for normalizing and distributing the firm’s trading data. Ella and Ron talk about how to grow and modernize a legacy system without compromising uptime, why game developers are the “musicians of software,” and some of the work Jane Street has done to try to hire a more diverse set of software engineers.

You can find the transcript for this episode  on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• EG, The League of Legends team that Ella is a huge fan of.
• Apache Kafka, the message bus that Gord migrated to.
• Some of the various sources of symbology you have to deal with when normalizing trading data. (Really, there are too many sources to list here!)
• A list of Jane Street’s recruiting Programs and Events, including INSIGHT, which focuses on women, and IN FOCUS, which focuses on historically underrepresented ethnic or racial minorities.