Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An oral history of Bank Python

calpaterson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 333 posts

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#71

Post by stevesimmons »

lmm wrote: post #29
rich_sasha wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s mostly true. The complaint with this kind of “industrial global Python code base”, be it at banks or elsewhere, is that often they are hastily cobbled together and depend on extreme user care to not flop over all the time. I guess banks are the archetypal places that care only about feature creation and not about maintenance or technical debt. When something does break in the end, someone senior just sho…

Hmm, I found the opposite - the fact that there was this global framework that managed all the data and code meant that access control was actually pretty good, better than most tech companies I've worked for. You had a single source of truth for what your access rights were, there was integrated Kerberos any time you needed to access a system outside Minerva. And having all the code in a managed place meant good dep…

This was 100% my experience too.

The biggest productivity gains were:

- having a single source of truth for both data and code (in a closely coupled environment)

- strong, battle-tested libraries to take care of all infrastructure concerns.

- enforced code dev/test/review/deployment workflows

This let the front-office devs be highly productive on adding real business value for their trading desks.

Remember also that these systems at GS, JPMorgan and BAML started around 2007-2010. The infra we all take for granted today at AWS/GCP/Azure simply did not exist back then, and banks' data security policies at the time did not allow cloud processing.

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#72

Post by simonh »

curiousgal wrote: post #63
tbojanin wrote: post #9

Sounds like it could be JPM's 'Athena' platform? context: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/jpmorgans-athena-has-35...

They are all similar but in this particular case this is definitely BAML's Quartz.

I think Minerva is clearly a reference to Athena.

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#73

Post by transitory_pce »

tecleandor wrote: post #60
transitory_pce wrote: post #37

Title should be ".. of investment bank python", trading and risk has little in common with a retail digital bank like say N26. The problem with these projects is that the folks leading them have never built a real trading system in entire their lives (the ones who have been there for many years worked with end-of-day batch systems) and there is a layer of useless and incompetent "business analysts" who hide behind th…

When you say "The problem with these banks..." you mean the ones like N26 (not investment banks)? (Seems like coffee hasn't kicked in for me yet)

Edited.

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#74

Post by Paladiamors »

simonh wrote: post #31
seanhunter wrote: post #21

I was the person who first deployed Python at Goldman Sachs. At the time it was an "unapproved technology" but the partner in charge of my division called me and said (This is literally word for word because partners didn't call me every day so I remember) Err....hi Sean, It's Armen. Uhh.... So I heard you like python.... well if someone was to uhh.... install python on the train... they probably wouldn't be fired. O…

I worked on Quartz for 3 years and loved it. Some devs grumbled about various aspects of it, but I come from an application support background and taught myself python, so I suppose I had fewer developer habits to un-learn. From what I understand, all this started with SecDB at Goldman, which was a the prototype for all these systems but wasn't Python based. The lore is that SecDB was instrumental in Goldman being ab…

I work at Beacon.io and it's an awesome place to be. Kirat is indeed a rockstar and it's awesome to work with an CEO that knows great code. We also landed a Series C last month and we're growing :)

https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/beacon-series-c--60...

We've also got a bunch of positions open too for those that are interested in joining!

https://www.beacon.io/careers/

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#75

Post by markus_zhang »

That's why working as the FIRST generation of programmers in any big financial shops is so fun. You get total ownership to whatever you build and others totally rely on you for their job. Even better, you can take months to reply to a requirement, if it doesn't come from a key stakeholder.

Edit: also applies to any large corporation.

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#76

Post by seanhunter »

simonh wrote: post #31
seanhunter wrote: post #21

I was the person who first deployed Python at Goldman Sachs. At the time it was an "unapproved technology" but the partner in charge of my division called me and said (This is literally word for word because partners didn't call me every day so I remember) Err....hi Sean, It's Armen. Uhh.... So I heard you like python.... well if someone was to uhh.... install python on the train... they probably wouldn't be fired. O…

I worked on Quartz for 3 years and loved it. Some devs grumbled about various aspects of it, but I come from an application support background and taught myself python, so I suppose I had fewer developer habits to un-learn. From what I understand, all this started with SecDB at Goldman, which was a the prototype for all these systems but wasn't Python based. The lore is that SecDB was instrumental in Goldman being ab…

I know Kirat really well. Fun fact, one two-week dev cycle we had 667 distinct developers commit to the secdb code base which Kirat's boss described to me as "The number of the beast.... plus Kirat"

Second fun thing. Kirat was advocating for lisp for secdb for a long time and used to rag on me for liking python when it's so slow.

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#77

Post by curiousgal »

simonh wrote: post #72
curiousgal wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are all similar but in this particular case this is definitely BAML's Quartz.

I think Minerva is clearly a reference to Athena.

Could be a misdirection because all of the rest fits Quartz to a tee.

The Quartz database is called Sandra (referred to as Barbara here).

The Quartz directed acyclic graph is called Dag (referred to as Dagger here)

The Quartz job runner is called Bob (referred to as Walpole here which is a reference to Robert Warpole whose shortname is..Bob)

These and the horrible proprietary IDE make it obvious which particular system he's describing.

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#78

Post by toyg »

urban_winter wrote: post #53

BAML Quartz was conceived by a bunch of front-office quants who had not the first idea about the software needs of a big bank beyond the front office. There was an arrogant assumption that front office software is obviously the most complicated/difficult variety of software within a bank and therefore any system designed with front office requirements at the forefront would, of course, be perfect for universal use. T…

> in London because it was easy to sell the fact that BAML was making a strategic investment in Python

I reckon I "felt" that push to hire at one of the early PyConUK, where your boys suddenly showed up with a big contingent. I even thought about applying, but I was not based in London - and there were some red flags, like running a pretty old Python version (I thing it was 2.2 or 2.1, when 2.4/2.5 were the expected mainstream), that kinda sounded like I'd be signing up for the modern equivalent of mainframe maintenance.

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#79

Post by fock »

zwaps wrote: post #42

I can report from another bank (in the top 10 globally), that recently moved from a more bespoke system (not even on Python) to having Python+Notebooks+Labs available to all - using Apache products and a global Anaconda-like Python distribution. The fact that you can use the Python, R or whatever programming language seems to be a factor.

would you mind telling, which Apache products. I've been thinking about pushing that to around my organization (mostly for replacing reporting/...) but especially the I/O-interfaces are not that great if you are not living in a central database yet.

I imagine something container-like with the notebook/batch-job (can be anything really), hooking up to datasources such as SMB-shares, thus allowing people who want to automate generating report Z to just request access to folder X for their job and thus be able to seamlessly create dashboards/... even if a lot of the org still is using "traditional" workflows.

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#80

Post by JoshTriplett »

seanhunter wrote: post #21

I was the person who first deployed Python at Goldman Sachs. At the time it was an "unapproved technology" but the partner in charge of my division called me and said (This is literally word for word because partners didn't call me every day so I remember) Err....hi Sean, It's Armen. Uhh.... So I heard you like python.... well if someone was to uhh.... install python on the train... they probably wouldn't be fired. O…

There are a number of workplaces where I'd have been willing to rely on "probably wouldn't be fired", but a bank is definitely not one of them. Congratulations on shipping something useful in the face of that risk and uncertainty.
Post reply on HN