Industry news & insights.

Why are more firms merging their production support and FIX onboarding functions? What are the advantages of re-using niche skills and tools? We explore the reasons why this is happening and argue the importance of giving production support better tooling, to allow them to handle more first-line FIX support which – in turn – can free up your FIX onboarders to bring on more customers faster.

Should API documentation be machine-readable or human-readable? Can firms move away from legacy documentation formats, such as Word, and create, edit, and distribute specs in a way that satisfies both? FinSpec schema is a machine-readable documentation format, which allows firms to electronically capture their API dictionary, grammar, workflows, and state machine. It also gives you the ability to capture things like change history, and layout, plus crucially also capture customer-specific transformations and normalisations.

Chris Lees discusses the challenge for firms completing FIX migration projects. We primarily focus on FIX engine migration, but large migration projects often include multiple pieces of FIX infrastructure. We cover key areas, including API consistency (vocabulary and dictionary), migrating customer-specific transformations, managing network changes, and all-important project tracking & reporting.

In this week's #dofixdifferently, Chris Lees talks to Christoph John, one of the key contributors to the QuickFIX/J FIX engine. Christoph is a Senior Software Developer for MACD, a financial services software company over in Aachen, Germany. Since 2011 Christoph has been a core code contributor to the QuickFIX/J engine, which is a full-featured FIX messaging engine written 100% in Java. We dive into what it's like to run open-source software, the history of the QuickFIX/J engine, and how you can get involved.

In this week's #90secondFIX, Chris Lees discusses the growing popularity of spec-first development in the Web API world, and how this can be effective for FIX API development. Traditionally, implementation-first development means writing down a set of requirements, someone then develops the integration and you work out whether that is correct or not. This creates a lot of back and forth as requirements iterate, which can cause confusion and consume resource.

In this week's #dofixdifferently, Chris Lees outlines how to make your API documentation genuinely re-usable. Efficient API documentation needs to be both human-readable and machine-readable, and in this episode Chris outlines approaching documentation in the right way, highlighting common pitfalls, and articulating how to go from where you are today over to a new, more re-usable (and automated) future.

In this week's #90secondFIX, Chris Lees introduces QuickFIX, what it is, and how it can and should be used. QuickFIX can either mean the open-source FIX engine or the XML format used for machine-readable FIX specifications.

In this episode, Chris talks to Oren Miller, the creator and maintainer of QuickFIX, exploring the original motivations for the project, what it's like maintaining such a popular open-source program, and the role of electronic documentation.

As a special Thanksgiving treat, this week we want to share a mini-series with you all about 'getting specs right'. Everything we're doing in our #dofixdifferently series is all about trying to make your firm more automated, smarter and get customers onboard faster. With documentation being such a key part of this, #dospecsdifferently delves into how to make specs infinitely more usable and authoritative.

We have FIX 4.2, FIX 4.4, Service Packs, and Extension Packs, but what is FIX Latest? FIX Latest breaks up the different parts of the FIX protocol into; Encoding, Session, and Application layer. FIX Latest is essentially a big pot of messages, fields, and enumerations enabling firms to pick and choose depending on the requirements of their API.