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Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

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

#201

Post by beepboopbeep »

lisper wrote: post #190
osullivj wrote: post #136

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.

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…

Not so much a scam per se, but a colossal example of correlation does not equal causation. At least for the old world traders. Newer hedge funds are definitely churning out returns that indicate something proprietary is going on. But anyone bragging about a gain of +2% over the market is kidding them selves.

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

#202

Post by eru »

lmkg wrote: post #186
eru wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hell, we even look at good programs and imagine we could have done them better.

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

#203

Post by eru »

bald wrote: post #197
lmkg wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

thank you. I have the feeling that many participants in this overall chauvinistic discussion here see themselves as artists that always produce perfect outcomes, ignoring the history and productivity of the software actually in place.

And on this positive note, you might want to have a look at efforts to make spreadsheets better: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/improvi...

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

#204

Post by jdmichal »

indescions_2017 wrote: post #172
mihaifm wrote: post #115

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…

Day to day traditional banking operations will be slow to innovate. Partially due to the regulatory burden as you describe. But also the perception there is little financial upside for the investment. Outside of that however change is happening. And you will see new products coming out of "Innovations" groups operating entrepreneurially. My colleagues at WF and JPMC are busy experimenting with distributed ledger tech…

It's probably worth noting that Zelle was mostly a rebranding of an existing service: clearXchange. Or, rather, a branding, as prior to the Zelle name, no one advertised the underlying clearXchange network.

I strongly agree with your general point. Just like any extremely large business, there's small sects pushing forward in various ways, while the vast majority toils away on SSDD stuff.

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

#205

Post by jacobush »

icebraining wrote: post #96
jacobush wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is very prescient of them! I now hold them in even higher regard.

Prescient? It was already true back then.

Maybe the not exactly right word. They had, back then too.

Maybe it's just that we are soooo deep down shit creek with no paddle now, that it's easy to forget that you could already tell clear signs of "big data vs the citizen" back in the 1970s if you just looked around you.

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

#206

Post by mattvi »

mihaifm wrote: post #115

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…

i appreciate the thoughtfulness of this thread very much... obviously, defintely hit a nerve.

and I agree with everything that's been said. i've been talking with a couple different banks (across the US) and they all are sharing the same concerns, whether their systems are VB6 or newer.

i'm with a group of machine learning and software maintenance folks who are trying to build tools to make refactoring/ migration/ speedups easier. if anyone is curious, we'd love to get feedback on the tools, see if they might help in similar situations, or could be improved.

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

#207

Post by jononor »

gt_ wrote: post #54
skissane wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love for a few banks to dump all their old COBOL code on to GitHub. Not because it would necessarily be useful for anything, but simply because it would be fascinating to read... There is actually very little open source COBOL code available, of the massive quantities of COBOL code written over the decades the vast, vast majority of it remains closed source. Sadly I think a lot of it is just going to be lost…

For a probably extreme but real example, I think I would prefer my Grandfather's specific duties with the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1940s not be released. I don't even like talking about what kind of scientist he was in some crowds.

You are not responsible for the acts of your grandfather.

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

#208

Post by jononor »

kuschku wrote: post #144
cutler wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is OO garbage. The giveaway is "Provider". The ball of mud that is OO inevitably necessitates enlisting an army of services, proxies, factories, builders and managers simply to work around the complexities of OO. Even if you have a simple problem OO tends to make it complex.

So how else do you implement that functionality, allowing you to choose the serialization protocol at runtime? You need some data structure to combine the functionality for serializing and deserializing, and you then need some function that can, depending on context, choose the correct such data structure. And now you've got your transportprotocolserializer, transportprotocolserializerprovider, and transportprotocols…

Have an interface for Serializer, with N (> 1) implementations. Write the code to decide which to implementation to use in whatever place is appropriate for the desired functionality. For code that don't get to decide, pass the Serializer instance in.

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

#209

Post by icahnvalyou »

jgalt212 wrote: post #12
icahnvalyou wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That + bloomberg hate + symphony's ridiculously good reception in the markets. Symphony's starting look like it could be finance's heroku/slack.

Bloomberg hate is really only the management level. At the user level, it's mostly love. Of course, by and large, the user does not directly foot the $20K/year bill.

truth (and Stockholm syndrome).

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

#210

Post by _dcwr »

jackewiehose wrote: post #44
almenon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's the standard way to write comments. It looks terrible but it's not bad to write because Visual Studio auto-generates the comment skeleton for you.

Embedding XML inside a C-comment (as a standard) is just fucked up. Do you have correct syntax highlighting with that? (I don't. But even if emacs would understand this, it's still wrong)

C++ with Doxygen and Java with Javadoc are much saner formats for this purpose.

What's even worse is that Visual Studio 2015 just vomits out that the XML is malformed when I have C++ headers with Doxygen style comments in them. It detects the three slashes and tries to apply C# XML docs parsing to them and that of course fails. Meanwhile NetBeans can handle them no problem and display parsed docs in pop ups.

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