#J.u.l.i.a. among the stars reddit full#

Based on how pessimistic you want to be, you can calculate your risk. Of all the scenarios (and there can be as many as a million) you can pick the most optimistic and most pessimistic and come up to a realistic scenario, which will be used to cap your risk. Since it's derivative trading, anything can happen in the future, depending on the movement of the stock. He explains, The computation involves simulating for every trade. He had figured out the right algorithms for calculating VAR (Value at Risk), and Viral implemented that and improved the performance of the system significantly. Ajay works with NIPPF (National Institute of Public Policy and Finance), and was given the responsibility to build this system.

While still in college, Viral wrote a system for the National Stock Exchange (NSE) with Ajay, which he believes is still in production for computing the risk in derivatives trading. He used to maintain a lot of distributed computing Linux kernel patches. He even became a Debian maintainer while in college. In his first year, he told his parents that he was still preparing for IIT-JEE, while he was actually busy learning C and Linux. He went to Padmabhushan Vasantdada Patil Pratishthan’s College of Engineering (Mumbai University), but never really attended college. He says, “The challenge in India for the masses is the lack of mentorship, and our education system doesn't create it for them.” Viral believes that getting mentors early on helped him a lot. He learnt everything about his modern programming from them.

His mentors Ajay Shah and Susan Thomas, two of the top economists of India.

Viral and Vikram collaborated for a lot of things later in life, but Viral is most thankful to Vikram for introducing him to some of the most important people in his life: But one person Viral is indebted to a lot is Vikram Agarwal, whom he met in junior college. In his school days, Viral had several collaborators in crime for all his scientific endeavours (and programming). He then learnt C on his own, and felt that it rendered immense performance that he never got to see in BASIC. When he programmed equations from the book Resnick Halliday in BASIC, it gave him good insight into scientific computing, without him even realising it. But he liked the IIT syllabus more than the board syllabus. Like millions of maths and science students in India, Viral prepared for the IIT-JEE. Viral on computer (at home) during his college days. When Viral came across computers, he was fascinated by BASIC language and programming. Apart from his interest in computers, he also discovered that he suffered from weak eyesight.

#J.u.l.i.a. among the stars reddit full#

Viral spent nights on the terrace, gazing at stars through his telescope, while his days were full of experimentation at the chemistry setup at home (it was easy to get as his father’s business was laboratory chemicals).

But I was looking to take time off from the school syllabus, which I thought wasn't that interesting.” He recalls, “I was always reasonably studious and kept to myself. Viral topped his class throughout his school days. He studied in Hindi Vidya Bhavan School for a simple reason–that it was close to his house and within the supervision of his parents. Viral owes his studious upbringing to his mother, who focused on her kids’ education and just wouldn’t accept anything less than the best. Quite the opposite in fact his father was an avid traveller, and so, he got a chance to see the world. This doesn’t, however, mean that he didn’t get to see his share of the world in his early days. But how did the heir to the Sevantilal Mahasukhlal & Company find himself at the crossroads of finance, public policy, and scientific computing? And what led him to make the choices he did? A reasonably studious childhood and an unreasonably high interest in computersīorn and brought up in Mumbai (then Bombay), Viral spent the first 21 years of his life in the same city. Whether it was building Aadhaar for a billion people, election campaigning for Nandan Nilekani, or creating Julia, the common thread running through his career has been impact.