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Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

db.com

181–190 of 216 posts

Re: Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

#181

This is mostly a PR move. I currently work at DB, I can say that they make it look nice from the outside, but when you get here what you find is a large mess. It's a big difference between a bank and a company that actually ships software. Most of the work here is done in interfacing systems together, and moving data from one place to another. There is no focus on quality, just patching things together and making the…

Can't say better!

Actually, the Bank - most of the big investment banks out there right now (Hello Goldman!) - are selling themselves as technology companies but they're far away from being or getting even close to that!

If you think of yourself smart enough and want to make an "impact" (at least a tiny one) or at least work in a nicer, more friendly and more technology focused environment for sure an investment Bank is not the place to be - even if it's in the electronic/automatic/algo/quantitative trading area(s)! Go to Google, FB, Amazon, Apple, etc. The biggest 5 market capitalizations in the world right now are technology companies anyways, you'll get the knowledge and the money (if it's your purpose).

And always remember, banks were, are and will always be primarily bankers/traders or whatever you want to call them place! Software engineers are at best an asset/tool even if software is eating the world and everything tend to be automated.

If you want to make it within an IB as a software engineer, you should spend lots of time learning and educating yourself (books - always read books folks!, blogs, side projects, hackatons, etc.) and not relying on internal projects or teams you're working in/with and if you want to make it to upper level - either go get yourself a master in Financial Engineering or any other Economics/Financial master and more important add those few words to your daily dictionary (forget about best practices, code smell, SOLID, etc.): "governance", "tactical", "strategic", "process" and lately "agile" (the word thrown everywhere and most of the people don't ever know what it means outside the Oxford dico definition.

Re: Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

#182
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just don't be redundant in any language. Unless there are multiple types of a "SerializationProvider", the name could be shortened to "ProtobufSerializationProvider" And if there are multiple types of "SerializationProvider" (ie. there's an unrelated "CachingSerializationProvider ") then the name is unfortunately long, but accurate

I think the main problem is not in the name of that class, the name is just a side effect of a bigger deeper problem.

What problem? DI is really useful if you're pragmatic about it, misuse is not really a property of a particular language

Re: Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

#183

This is mostly a PR move. I currently work at DB, I can say that they make it look nice from the outside, but when you get here what you find is a large mess. It's a big difference between a bank and a company that actually ships software. Most of the work here is done in interfacing systems together, and moving data from one place to another. There is no focus on quality, just patching things together and making the…

Somebody told me that at Lloyds Bank, the core standing order system is still written in pounds, shillings and pence. There's just a translation routine sitting on top of it.

Re: Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German law doesn't have a public domain, so Apache license is as close as you can get.

Why wouldn't MIT or BSD License be closer?

Apache2 has an explicit patent license.

Re: Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's going to change in the next days, when the media's gonna publish the news that Firefox now partnered with Burda Media Group to track your browsing history in Germany. See the HN thread from friday, where Mozilla employees even defend it as a good thing that Firefox by default now sends everything you type into the URL bar to CliqZ.

Not involved with Mozilla... But.. Was this not the case with Google for years? Also that's always been configurable. It's not a hidden config setting either. Mozilla can do whatever defaults they want they'll just get overriden when I login to my Sync account unlike Chrome though my data is encrypted and mine not theirs.

> It's not a hidden config setting either.

Yes it is now

> they'll just get overriden when I login to my Sync account

They explicitly won’t, the new feature overrides all your synced settings and explicitly defaults to sending all your URLs to the ad and tracking company Burda Media Group.

Re: Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

#186
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spreadsheets are heavily used in all financial sectors. Personally I've connected many trader developed pricing spreadsheets to etrading systems at investments banks. Last year I was contracting for a large UK mortgage lender who used spreadsheets for all their product dev & spec. Spreadsheets enable bankers to move quicker than bespoke or vendor supplied solutions, hence their enduring popularity.

Any complicated spreadsheet might be a bug ridden mess, but at least it's one the finance guys understand and can augment themselves. Alternatively they could wait for in-house IT to take a few years and millions of pounds (add going running over schedule and budget, too) to produce a bug ridden mess that misses.

Programmers tend to look at shitty programs and imagine better ways that it could have been done... In practice the competitor to a shitty program is not a better program, but no program at all. Even shitty software can still make the world a better place, and the preponderance of half-assed bug-ridden brain-dead garbage software should be seen as a good thing.

Re: Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Germany is a great country for stuff like this. They have a relatively high share of Linux users, OpenStreetMap usage, etc. I feel like they're very critical towards their own country and don't take things for granted (not the "we're so proud of our country" idea). This is especially also the case, because of the post-WWII history of East Germany. The Stasi managed to subdue the entire population, mainly with surve…

tbh i think that germany is lagging in digital, its a shift that if they dont take right now could cost them long term. something that event merkel commented recently. mobile internet is very expensive, 20 eur for 5gb, there is almost no street view, blocking content on youtube. high percentage of german startups are just copying ( famous rocket internet ). that are just some examples, that are not so great starting…

I have to agree. Add a lot of stock listed large companies which have not invested in IT and infrastructure for the past two decades apart from compliance enforced maintenance and Germany is basically 3rd world... startups also are lacking value. Looking at Berlin you kind of say „oh this is a copy of ...“ most of the time.

Re: Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

#189
post #7

Great move. I really believe in the "free software, free society" idea of the FSF. After this batch, I'm sure there will still be a lot left to open source, but it's definitely a big step! If we're fortunate, others will follow suit. Germany is a great country for stuff like this. They have a relatively high share of Linux users, OpenStreetMap usage, etc. I feel like they're very critical towards their own country an…

I don't understand what exactly this code is about but I have problems imagining the Deutsche Bank as a company that acts "for the greater good". As a german I envy you for your drug laws.

DB just like every bank in EU actually is legally forced to make some compliance changes for interoperability.

Thus releasing this and possibly pushing workload and costs onto other banks from business side makes sense.

Re: Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard some banks still did crazy things like calculating mortgage payments with spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets are heavily used in all financial sectors. Personally I've connected many trader developed pricing spreadsheets to etrading systems at investments banks. Last year I was contracting for a large UK mortgage lender who used spreadsheets for all their product dev & spec. Spreadsheets enable bankers to move quicker than bespoke or vendor supplied solutions, hence their enduring popularity.

I once did some consulting for a very prominent bond fund manager. His main tool was an excel spreadsheet which was the most godawful mess you can imagine. Dozens of separate pages with tens to hundreds of thousands of cells each. I ended up writing some VB code to dump all the formulas into a text file where I could parse them and do some automated analysis (using Common Lisp). It turned out that the spreadsheet was in fact as much of a train wreck as it appeared to be. Most of it turned out to be dead code, i.e. >50% (I don't remember the exact number) of the cells did not figure into the final result.

But the worst part was that there turned out to be a single input that completely dominated the final result, and that input was a "gut feel" that the fund manager had about which way the market was going to move. So after all that calculation, the upshot was that the fund investment decisions were being made based on this individual's intuitions, and the entire spreadsheet was just window dressing. Ironically, the audience for the window dressing was the fund manager and his team because the spread sheet was considered proprietary, a closely guarded secret. That's the reason I'm not revealing the name of the manager. I'm probably still bound by the terms of the NDA.

That was the moment that I realized that much, if not most, of Wall Street is a colossal scam.

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