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I'm a consulting actuary. What am I doing here? I've been programming since I was 11 and still do it often. You have to as an actuary. Besides I have some web

by Bootvis 12y ago

I'm a consulting actuary. What am I doing here? I've been programming since I was 11 and still do it often. You have to as an actuary. Besides I have some web skills and I'm using to build a startup doing risk management for farmers. In this startup I'm responsible for the whole stack.

Kluny 12y ago
What does an actuary do? And what programming do you do?
- pessimizer 12y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuary
- Bootvis 12y ago
  What an actuary does depends, other replies indicate that actuaries don't do as much programming as I thought they did. However, I do a lot. At the moment I'm mainly responsible for building a large cash flow model (40k lines of VBA).
lself 12y ago
Also an actuary. Consulted at one time but work at a company now. I started programming around the same age and also use it for work. We all do SQL but I am the only one doing general purpose coding at my company. Also have web skills (the coincidences just keep coming). I do a few things on the side and am contemplating a bootstrapped startup soonish. For example, I did everything but the logo on this site: http://tvsift.com/ http://tvsift.com/
- bornhuetter 12y ago
  I'm an actuary as well! I would dispute GP that "as an actuary you have to program". The overwhelming majority of actuaries I know barely know how to use VBA. I quit chasing a career in Comp Sci at uni (I started programming at a very young age, and always wanted to be a software engineer) to switch to actuarial science, but now, even though I'm a Fellow, I've quit my job to go into entrepreneurship. I think that being an actuary places us very well to go into startups that take advantage of our analytic and risk management skill set. With the amount of data being collected, that means about 90% of startups.
  - Bootvis 12y ago
    I can't argue with your experiences and I guess I have been living in a bubble. With all the legacy data we have (the company started using IT in the 60s and the coverages are until the end of life... AS/400 is still in active use) data munging is a task in itself. I fully agree with your last sentence! May I ask what you're working on?
- Bootvis 12y ago
  May I ask how big your company is? I'm quite surprised to hear you're the only one that codes. In our risk modeling of 15, 10 code daily. If I understand correctly tvsift shows were you can find streaming services for a particular Tv-series, am I right? Looks well done, I like the filter. Unfortunately for me the links below the series are not working for me on iPad (latest iOS).
actuary 12y ago
Also a consulting actuary, here for the same reason as you. The number of actuaries replying here is pretty remarkable given the extremely small size of the profession. As far as I know there is exactly one credentialed actuary working in any capacity in SV, but that number can only go up in the future.
mattmalin 12y ago
I'm also an actuary, but do some coding in my own time. I'm primarily here due to interest on current technology and programming trends and generally interesting articles. Our team does a lot of analysis programming in R rather than taking the more common Excel/VBA approach. This allows common practices in software development such as version control tools (and the collaboration they can help with), testing, deployment strategies, etc, to be a major part of the usual workflow that would otherwise be missing from the usual speadsheet world so exposure to HN helps promote this in my mind as good practice. The main draw of HN for me is the consistently high quality of posts and comments. I can be sure that were I to see the same content posted across general news sites, or other aggregators such as Reddit, then HN would be the only place I'd care to look and be certain that I'd also be learning plenty (often more than the original article) from the HN comments alone.
- Bootvis 12y ago
  Our team does a lot of analysis programming in R rather than taking the more common Excel/VBA approach. This allows common practices in software development such as version control tools (and the collaboration they can help with), testing, deployment strategies, etc, to be a major part of the usual workflow that would otherwise be missing from the usual speadsheet world so exposure to HN helps promote this in my mind as good practice. One nice trick your average actuary won't come up with is recursively exporting all your VBA code. The model I'm building is one big .xlsm referencing .xla's referencing other .xla's. By selecting the .xlsm in the VBA IDE we can export all code to a folder (with sub folders for every part) and put this in version control. Unfortunately, unit testing remains difficult in Basic. I try to control the problems caused by a lack of test by regularly regressing the enormous amounts of output we have. If things that shouldn't change, change we know we have a problem. Of course, this testing can be automated.

by Bootvis 12y ago

Kluny 12y ago

What does an actuary do? And what programming do you do?

pessimizer 12y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuary
Bootvis 12y ago
What an actuary does depends, other replies indicate that actuaries don't do as much programming as I thought they did. However, I do a lot. At the moment I'm mainly responsible for building a large cash flow model (40k lines of VBA).

lself 12y ago

Also an actuary. Consulted at one time but work at a company now. I started programming around the same age and also use it for work. We all do SQL but I am the only one doing general purpose coding at my company. Also have web skills (the coincidences just keep coming). I do a few things on the side and am contemplating a bootstrapped startup soonish. For example, I did everything but the logo on this site: http://tvsift.com/ http://tvsift.com/

bornhuetter 12y ago
I'm an actuary as well! I would dispute GP that "as an actuary you have to program". The overwhelming majority of actuaries I know barely know how to use VBA. I quit chasing a career in Comp Sci at uni (I started programming at a very young age, and always wanted to be a software engineer) to switch to actuarial science, but now, even though I'm a Fellow, I've quit my job to go into entrepreneurship. I think that being an actuary places us very well to go into startups that take advantage of our analytic and risk management skill set. With the amount of data being collected, that means about 90% of startups.
- Bootvis 12y ago
  I can't argue with your experiences and I guess I have been living in a bubble. With all the legacy data we have (the company started using IT in the 60s and the coverages are until the end of life... AS/400 is still in active use) data munging is a task in itself. I fully agree with your last sentence! May I ask what you're working on?
Bootvis 12y ago
May I ask how big your company is? I'm quite surprised to hear you're the only one that codes. In our risk modeling of 15, 10 code daily. If I understand correctly tvsift shows were you can find streaming services for a particular Tv-series, am I right? Looks well done, I like the filter. Unfortunately for me the links below the series are not working for me on iPad (latest iOS).

actuary 12y ago

Also a consulting actuary, here for the same reason as you. The number of actuaries replying here is pretty remarkable given the extremely small size of the profession. As far as I know there is exactly one credentialed actuary working in any capacity in SV, but that number can only go up in the future.

mattmalin 12y ago

I'm also an actuary, but do some coding in my own time. I'm primarily here due to interest on current technology and programming trends and generally interesting articles. Our team does a lot of analysis programming in R rather than taking the more common Excel/VBA approach. This allows common practices in software development such as version control tools (and the collaboration they can help with), testing, deployment strategies, etc, to be a major part of the usual workflow that would otherwise be missing from the usual speadsheet world so exposure to HN helps promote this in my mind as good practice. The main draw of HN for me is the consistently high quality of posts and comments. I can be sure that were I to see the same content posted across general news sites, or other aggregators such as Reddit, then HN would be the only place I'd care to look and be certain that I'd also be learning plenty (often more than the original article) from the HN comments alone.

Bootvis 12y ago
Our team does a lot of analysis programming in R rather than taking the more common Excel/VBA approach. This allows common practices in software development such as version control tools (and the collaboration they can help with), testing, deployment strategies, etc, to be a major part of the usual workflow that would otherwise be missing from the usual speadsheet world so exposure to HN helps promote this in my mind as good practice. One nice trick your average actuary won't come up with is recursively exporting all your VBA code. The model I'm building is one big .xlsm referencing .xla's referencing other .xla's. By selecting the .xlsm in the VBA IDE we can export all code to a folder (with sub folders for every part) and put this in version control. Unfortunately, unit testing remains difficult in Basic. I try to control the problems caused by a lack of test by regularly regressing the enormous amounts of output we have. If things that shouldn't change, change we know we have a problem. Of course, this testing can be automated.