201–210 of 333 posts
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I go for James Bond references, when I can. 'Moonraker' is always a great choice. Sometimes I'm constrained to a specific starting letter, so I've had to stretch it at times, like when I needed an 'S-' word... ended up going with 'Sinatra' since Nancy Sinatra performed 'You Only Live Twice' for that movie
Sean ? Spectre ? Sexism ?
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…
For some context (as an ex-Goldman employee myself), "Armen" in the quote is most probably https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/outlook/bios/armen-ava... , who has quite a legendary reputation within the firm for the work he's done. He was also one of the first to be hired as a "strat", which used to be how Goldman referred to its quants who sat between front office and tech systems and worked with both sides.
> I've mentioned that programmers are far too dismissive of MS Excel. You can achieve a awful lot with Excel: more, even, than some programmers can achieve without it This is one of the most underrated topics in tech imho. Spreadsheet is probably the pinnacle of how tech could be easily approachable by non tech people, in the "bike for the mind" sense. We came a long way down hill from there when you need an speciali…
> I've mentioned that programmers are far too dismissive of MS Excel. You can achieve a awful lot with Excel: more, even, than some programmers can achieve without it This is one of the most underrated topics in tech imho. Spreadsheet is probably the pinnacle of how tech could be easily approachable by non tech people, in the "bike for the mind" sense. We came a long way down hill from there when you need an speciali…
problem as described to me is that excel starts being used for regulated processes and it's not well auditable, access controlled, changed controlled, tracked, etc etc. Then people need to implement the exact same process across departments and they're all using a separate excel sheet and they all submit different numbers. becomes a huge mess and so much more complicated and expensive systems become commissioned.
Solution: the bank put together a system that constructs (from Excel templates and the bank trading data and market data) Excel spreadsheets from scratch every day, then used those for the calculations, and stored them. But now it was "a system", so all good.
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…
Correct. SecDB has its own language, S-lang, which you could probably best describe as a "lispy Smalltalk, with a hefty sprinkling of Frankenstein". The concept of SecDB was so good that other large banks wanted to get their own. Athena and Quartz have been mentioned several times in this thread, by people far more knowledgeable than I could ever be.
It's not just banking, I know of at least one large pension/insurance company who are building their own version of SecDB, with direct lines to GS. (They don't try to hide it, btw: the company is Rothesay Life.) The last time I talked with them, they were looking for Rust devs.
Disclosure: I work at Beacon.
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…
One day I will sit down and write a small poem about the insanity of software development based on my experience with Quartz. It will be an intriguing story of love and hate being told through a sensual dance between sales and engineering. The battles will not be epic but the consequences of one’s actions will be far reaching.
It was indeed and experience worth having.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
problem as described to me is that excel starts being used for regulated processes and it's not well auditable, access controlled, changed controlled, tracked, etc etc. Then people need to implement the exact same process across departments and they're all using a separate excel sheet and they all submit different numbers. becomes a huge mess and so much more complicated and expensive systems become commissioned.
Fun story: I was at a bank that used Excel for everything. As you say, there came a complaint from the auditors that it's not well auditable, and there needed to be "a system". Solution: the bank put together a system that constructs (from Excel templates and the bank trading data and market data) Excel spreadsheets from scratch every day, then used those for the calculations, and stored them. But now it was "a syste…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
problem as described to me is that excel starts being used for regulated processes and it's not well auditable, access controlled, changed controlled, tracked, etc etc. Then people need to implement the exact same process across departments and they're all using a separate excel sheet and they all submit different numbers. becomes a huge mess and so much more complicated and expensive systems become commissioned.
Fun story: I was at a bank that used Excel for everything. As you say, there came a complaint from the auditors that it's not well auditable, and there needed to be "a system". Solution: the bank put together a system that constructs (from Excel templates and the bank trading data and market data) Excel spreadsheets from scratch every day, then used those for the calculations, and stored them. But now it was "a syste…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> python build, dependency and deployment management is exceptionally awful in every respect, this isn't as big a pain point in other languages I'm not sure how to react to that, but these features in Python are miles ahead of what many other languages have (or actually don't have).
Am I the only one who has never had enough headache over the years to say its awful? I do think dependency management is a somewhat difficult problem to solve and a lot of systems have pros/cons but I never have had huge issues with Python's.
I worked on Quartz for a while as a contractor. Hated every second of it. Python version was old (2.4 if I remember correctly when 3.x was already the popular version). But that wasn't it. It was the proprietary version of everything in the stack that got me. Proprietary ide, source control, libs etc. I noted that none of the others who have been there for years have any transferable skills that can cary them out of…
I'd expect with so many devs working on this the DevX will be ironed out