Dominic Palmer

Dominic Palmer

Software Engineer at Maven Securities. Previously a Software Engineer at Applied Systems and Statistical Analyst at First Central.

About

3 minute read

Overview

Hi, I'm Dom. I'm a software engineer in the Post Trade Systems team at Maven Securities, a leading market maker and proprietary trading firm.

Prior to Maven I worked as a software engineer and development team lead at an insurance technology company called Applied Systems, and as a statistical analyst at an insurer called First Central.

Here you can read about me, my background, and what I'm currently working on. You can also read articles I write for my blog.

Background

I started programming in 2014 at the University of Sussex, whilst mid-way through my undergraduate degree in Maths. I had enrolled on two numerical analysis courses, both of which taught computer science principles through MATLAB, plus the application of those principles in solving traditional computation problems. Examples include the discretisation of differential equations, numerical quadrature, interpolation, and eigenvalue problems.

After graduating from Sussex I completed a Master's degree in Applied Mathematics at Imperial College London. The master's course covered application of mathematical theory in the context of computer science, and here I picked up C and C++ for my master's project. I wrote a coarse-grained simulation of tumour growth in C++ that targeted Imperial's high performance computing clusters. Source code is available on my GitHub.

I later moved to Python for data science and machine learning at First Central, then backend software engineering in C# for financial services. During my time at Applied Systems I worked with C#, SQL Server, and JavaScript. At Maven Securities I predominantly work with .NET 6/7/8, JavaScript, HTML/CSS and Postgres, although I also build applications using TypeScript, MongoDB and other technologies when suitable.

Outside of work I enjoy trying out new technologies. As an example, this website is backed by Jekyll, the Liquid template language and SCSS.

light-plus-plus-preview Light++: my personal light theme for VSCode. Find it by searching for Light++ under Extensions. I also have personal themes for JetBrains IDEs, and a custom config for WezTerm.

I'm a believer in mastery of tooling - take a look at my dotfiles for an idea of what I run on Windows and Linux boxes to maximise productivity. I also contribute to open source projects that I care about. Recent contributions include:

Education

I was awarded a BSc in Mathematics (First Class Honours) from the University of Sussex in 2016, with full scholarship granted for continued masters study. I was also presented with the 'Prize for Excellent Mathematics BSc Performance' for graduating top of class.

I was awarded an MSc in Applied Mathematics (Distinction) from Imperial College London in 2018.

I completed the famed CS50 course offered by Harvard University during my time at Imperial. The verified certificate can be viewed here.

Interests

I enjoy travelling, experiencing new cultures, and learning something new every day. I tend to be interested by world and economic history, wildlife, nature and science.

vietnam Resting outside a Vietnamese coconut farm after cycling a route through the Mekong Delta. Circa 2018.

I also enjoy playing chess. Familiarity with the game brings admiration for top level play, but you don't need to be familiar to take interest in great games regardless.

Check out the blog for more.