Susan Potter

Susan Potter

Software Architect/Developer, Real Estate Investor/Broker & Entrepreneur

Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Area

Current
  • Partner at Collective Turf Coworking
  • CTO & Ruby/Rails, Erlang/OTP Software Architect at Finsignia, LLC
Past
  • Server-Side Architect & Developer (consulting through Finsignia) at Personal Life Media, Inc
  • Ruby on Rails Engineer (consulting through Finsignia) at Stark Investments
  • Senior Ruby Software Consultant (consulting through Finsignia) at Outspark
Education
  • The University of Manchester
Connections
181 connections
Industry
Computer Software
Websites

Susan Potter’s Summary

Worked at three global investment banks and two hedge fund firms in London, Chicago & Milwaukee respectively in software development, business analysis and technical management roles.

Susan Potter’s Specialties:

Business: Capital Markets, Credit Derivatives, FX, Risk Management.

Technical: Object Oriented Design (OO), Functional Programming (FP), Agile Process, Scrum, Continuous Integration, Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Test Driven Development (TDD), Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Open Source (OSS), REST (Resource Oriented Architecture or ROA).

Programming Languages: Erlang, Erlang/OTP, R, Ruby, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Python.


Susan Potter’s Experience

  • Partner

    Collective Turf Coworking

    (Executive Office industry)

    February 2009Present (10 months)

    Creating a coworking space for freelancers and solo entrepreneurs who want to bounce ideas off of each other and maybe even collaborate on new projects together.

  • CTO & Ruby/Rails, Erlang/OTP Software Architect

    Finsignia, LLC

    (Financial Services industry)

    January 2006Present (3 years 11 months)

    Developing long-term strategy for product and platform architecture, negotiating joint venture deals and managing engineering resources on product development team. Designing and developing risk management framework in Erlang OTP.

    Previously a Principal Software Consultant @ Finsignia....
    Consulting for hedge funds and technology clients to help design and implement full-cycle front-to-back office software integration.

    Clients include:
    - Personal Life Media project: see separate entry.
    - Stark Investments project: see separate entry.
    - Outspark project: see separate entry.
    - SkyRoad ASP project: see separate entry.

  • Server-Side Architect & Developer (consulting through Finsignia)

    Personal Life Media, Inc

    (Internet industry)

    December 2007March 2009 (1 year 4 months)

    Solo software architect, designer, developer and system administrator for fast growing west coast lifestyle podcast network. Several systems collaborate using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) via REST APIs written in Ruby on Rails and deployed on CentOS Linux servers (multiple).

  • Ruby on Rails Engineer (consulting through Finsignia)

    Stark Investments

    (Privately Held; Investment Management industry)

    July 2007December 2007 (6 months)

    Developed Ruby on Rails features for existing web application that allowed the ABS/MBS (Asset/Mortgage Backed Securities) desk analysts and traders to analyze deals.

  • Senior Ruby Software Consultant (consulting through Finsignia)

    Outspark

    (Privately Held; Computer Games industry)

    January 2007June 2007 (6 months)

    Designed and developed RESTful web services platform for external game partners using Ruby, Rails, JSON, XML, XHTML, CSS, Javascript.

  • Software Consultant (consulting through Finsignia)

    Sky Road, LLC

    (Computer Software industry)

    June 2006December 2006 (7 months)

    Designing, developing, testing and deploying SaaS/ASP, custom hosted and enterprise software solutions using Java/JEE/J2EE/JBoss, Oracle, MySQL, SQL, Linux (RHEL) for various clients.

  • Senior Consultant

    Bungii, LLC

    (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

    April 2001December 2005 (4 years 9 months)

    As Principal Consultant I advised clients primarily in the hedge fund, open source, and capital markets fields. I lead and managed teams to deliver and maintain high availability, business effective, production quality systems using Java, J2EE, Ruby, Python, C++, XML, SOAP, Sybase, Oracle, SQL, Perl and more.

    Clients have included: Citadel Investment Group (twice), Red Hat, and Bank of America.

  • Software Process Manager (consulting through Finsignia)

    Bank of America

    (Public Company; BAC; Banking industry)

    June 2005November 2005 (6 months)

    Worked with architecture, testing and development teams on a large Interest Rate Derivatives (IRD) front- and middle- office suite of software products written in Java/J2EE/JEE. Responsible for coordinating efforts to improve development process including:
    * reducing software release cycles from 6 months to a more reasonable timeline
    * decoupling software products such that many products could be launched independently of each other (thus helping cut down the software release cycles drastically)
    * creating more consistent coding standards and conventions such that developers on one product could be moved to another product such that APIs and usages were consistent across products and applications.

  • J2EE Architect (consulting through Bungii)

    Red Hat

    (Public Company; RHT; Computer Software industry)

    January 2004June 2004 (6 months)

    Worked on J2EE B2B portal for Red Hat partners. From conception through initial deployments of site. Using Java 1.4, J2EE, EJB, Servlets, JSPs, Oracle, Python and PHP.

  • Project & Technical Management Consultant (consulting through Bungii LLC)

    Citadel Investment Group

    (Privately Held; Financial Services industry)

    20022004 (2 years )

    Led three internal software product teams simultaneously:
    * A J2EE/EJB server-side product (the back-bone of operations for the hedge firm until the end of the project), which provided access for virtually all front-office and middle-office systems as well as some back-office support. Available 24/7 and available to all trading offices in firm (Tokyo, San Francisco, Chicago, London, Connecticut). APIs provided 360-degree data views of trades, issuers (capital and corporate structures) and 37 asset classes of millions of securities.
    * A framework that provided J2EE developers within the firm common and consistent access to in-house LDAP configuration and authentication facilities managed by internal team.
    * Three middle-office desktop applications written in Java/Swing that accessed the Securities (supported 37 asset classes of financial instruments from common stock to CDOs, MBS, CDS, etc.), Capital Structures and Corporate Structures APIs.

  • Java Software Engineer

    Blue Tiger Networks

    (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

    January 2000April 2001 (1 year 4 months)

    Designed, developed and tested software for a peer-to-peer B2B trading system written in Java.

  • Young Executive

    BNP Paribas

    (Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; BNPQY.PK; Capital Markets industry)

    1999December 1999 (less than a year)

    Developed object-oriented (OO) risk management library in C++ and later Java, based on trader and quantitative researcher requirements.

  • E Business Technology Analyst

    Morgan Stanley Dean Witter

    (Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; MSDW; Capital Markets industry)

    May 19981998 (less than a year)

    Designed, developed and deployed web based applications for external and internal (Fixed Income) clients. Interfaced with internal clients and translated business requirements into technical projects.

  • Developer

    Trixter Productions

    (Non-Profit; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

    June 1996May 1998 (2 years )

    Developed web-based systems for various clients and included a distributed options valuation server product that was sponsored by a financial technology firm. Distributed options valuation server was written in C++ and Java (JNI and RMI).


Susan Potter’s Education

  • The University of Manchester

    BSc(Hons) , Mathematics


Additional Information

Susan Potter’s Websites:

Susan Potter’s Interests:

agile software, lean project management methodologies, indie music, indie film, small-to-medium businesses, startups, SaaS, SOA.

Susan Potter’s Groups:

Champaign-Urbana's Freelancers Meetup

  •    Business on Rails
  •    ChampaignUrbana Linked
  •    Hedge Fund Group (HFG)
  •    Fedora
  •    Ruby
  •    Ruby Users WebWide
  •    Web Freelancers
  •    RoR (Ruby on Rails) Open Source Network
  •    Rubyists
  •    Software as a Service (SaaS) Group
  •    Merb
  •    Trading Technology
  •    HedgeCo Hedge Fund Discussion Group
  •    Champaign-Urbana Freelancers

Susan Potter’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

  • career opportunities
  • consulting offers
  • new ventures
  • job inquiries
  • expertise requests
  • business deals
  • reference requests
  • getting back in touch

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