About Me

Hey. I'm Chris Smith, author of The Aeron Files. I'm a software developer in the UK.

LMAX

I was at LMAX for nearly 10 years. I learnt a lot about cluster technology while I was there and was privileged to work with Martin Thompson (creator of Aeron), Dave Farley and a bunch of other very clever folk. They developed their own in-house cluster technology before Aeron was around, which shared a lot of the same concepts. It required deterministic behaviour, had journals and snapshots, etc.

Adaptive Financial Consulting

I later worked at Adaptive, with another very talented team developing a low-latency CLOB exchange. We were using Aeron Cluster with Adaptive's Hydra platform. I had the pleasure of working with Olivier Deheurles, CTO and co-founder of Adaptive. Also at Adaptive was Shaun Laurens, author of Aeron Cookbook, which later became Aeron.io (unbeknown to him, but one of his animated diagrams was a significant influence on how I went on to develop mine).

After I worked there, Adaptive went on to acquire Martin's company Real Logic in 2022, gaining the expertise of both Martin and Todd Montgomery. Aeron is now owned and operated by Adaptive, which is the go-to place for Aeron training and consultancy.

TransFICC

I currently work at TransFICC, another place using Aeron and Aeron Cluster. They are a Fixed Income hub, providing integrations with Fixed Income venues - you integrate once with the hub, and they can connect you to whichever venue you want. Here, low latency is key, as they want to add as little overhead as possible to the connection.

Contact

Contact me at theaeronfiles@stablecode.co.uk