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By Gary Kennedy - Jul 1, 2026
A transaction ID is a dull reference number that has to appear on a contract note, in an email, or in a support call. Who would have thought there was much to say about it? Well, there is! Babylon’s transaction ID is designed to be compact, human-facing, stable across corrections, independent of database sequences, and safe to read and type. An ID such as 78MP-R7P2-W8XY is short enough for real use because it uses an alphabet of letters and digits rather than plain decimal numbers: for the same number of characters, that gives us many more possibilities. But letters introduce an unexpected problem. Helpful four-character grouping can accidentally produce rude or awkward words, so care has to be taken not to issue those IDs.
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By Gary Kennedy - Jun 10, 2026
When we first used EasyEquities we were puzzled that we could not find transaction confirmations anywhere within the platform. There was a Transaction History section, but it only displayed summaries of recent activity.
We eventually realised that the trade notification email is, in fact, the transaction confirmation. However, it is an email and it omits two crucial identifiers: the listing symbol (known as the alpha code on the JSE) and the ISIN. Instead, only the security description is provided.
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By Gary Kennedy - Apr 7, 2026
Refactoring a codebase into well-defined modules is one of those tasks every developer knows is valuable—but rarely prioritises.
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By Gary Kennedy - Mar 22, 2026
Codex isn’t just writing code — it’s changing how I think about building software.
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By Gary Kennedy - Jan 20, 2026
There’s a particular kind of joy and satisfaction that comes from seeing something work for the very first time.
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By Gary Kennedy - Nov 25, 2025
Brokerage accounts provide trade history data in many different tabular formats – each with its own naming quirks, column conventions, ordering, and hidden assumptions.
Yet behind this diversity lies a consistent set of trade attributes with inherent structural relationships:
quantities, prices, consideration, fees, proceeds, dates, instruments, and identifiers.
This is exactly where a semantic inference engine can shine.
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By Gary Kennedy - Nov 20, 2025
If you scan JSE instrument lists, broker CSV files, or pricing feeds, you may notice that some shares end with “-N” in their short name.
This isn’t a typo or data issue — the “-N” suffix indicates a specific, legacy class of reduced-vote ordinary shares known as N Ordinary shares, or NOrd.
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By Gary Kennedy - Nov 18, 2025
TL;DR: We originally built a phrase-based parser for segment ledger quick entry, but it was too strict.
Refactoring led us to anchor on the verb in the sentence (“buy”, “sell”), allowing us to identify the Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) structure.
This made the parser far more flexible and capable of handling natural, messy, human descriptions — including tricky cases like “GBP”, which can be both a currency and a listing symbol!
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By Gary Kennedy - Nov 4, 2025
TL;DR: On the London Stock Exchange GBP was, until very recently, the ticker symbol for Global Petroleum Limited. This rare overlap is confusing to humans and machines alike, and serves as a reminder that context matters.
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By Gary Kennedy - Oct 22, 2025
Excel includes two powerful but often overlooked features: the Stocks and Currency data types.
These allow you to pull delayed market and FX data directly into your spreadsheet — no plugins or VBA required.
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