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An oral history of Bank Python

calpaterson.com

241–250 of 333 posts

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#241

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the spirit of dubno lives on...

But does he? There seem to be a lot of people in the know on this thread. He seems to have disappeared after leaving BofA.

deep sea diving was last i heard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKvJrCvIvOc and before that he was featured in a wsj article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/goldman-sachs-has-started-givin...

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#242

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I second your opinion (interned @ Athena, not Quartz) - compared to my current BigN experience everything was worse by a magnitude: the IDE, the source control, the review mechanism, the job scheduler and so on. I'd expect with so many devs working on this the DevX will be ironed out

I wonder how did they make the IDE? Must be an interesting job for whoever got to write it, and hell for whoever is maintaining it and using it, lol.

Some questions are best left unanswered... :)

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#243

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The Greek and Roman gods have always been a go-to for project names, LOL. We need to give some other cultures a shot!

With particularly poor timing, I chose the Egyptian goddess Isis.

One of the systems downstream of the JPM ‘Minerva’ (Athena) was called ISIS.

It was renamed…

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#244
post #152

> 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…

Very true. I often prototype algorithms and things in google sheets. One time I had backpropagation working in there, with a little button to process the next "row" of training samples.

I used to work for a very successful company that produced mobile games. The entire logic of the game, the rules, etc. was all in Excel

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#245

There's a lot here in common with the higher-prestige systems operated by major tech companies. Giant custom monorepos, sometimes with custom IDEs built into them. Big proprietary services for running asynchronous jobs and collecting logs and everything else. Data-driven frameworks for spinning up new services. Bespoke databases. All of it rings a bell. The one thing in there that really jumped out at me as "oh my go…

It’s not just straight pickle (usually) - there’s a layer in between that allows at the very least for the handling of deprecated fields/new fields/renames etc.

But - after a change - you have to choose either to leave that ‘backward compatibility’ in-place (essentially forever), or put together a job to run (on that scheduler! Hah) to go re-write in your new format. If you care enough, you might - and then you can remove your logic to handle the old names/shapes.

The charm in a lot of it is in its simplicity. It doesn’t claim to very smart, but people get it - and are often remarkably productive.

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#246
post #91

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I think Athena has equivalents to all of these but I don't know what they're called. I only know Qz.

The Athena database is Hydra; The Athena graph is Pixie; The Athena job runner is also Bob

I find it amusing that Bob made it in most of the banks, but few of the other names stuck.

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#247
post #226

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That's precisely why he did it the way he did. He had total deniability. Here's how the conversation would go if it went wrong somehow: "Armen, did you tell Sean to install python?" "No". "Sean, did Armen tell you to install python?" "Err... no. He said I probably wouldn't be fired." "Well it turns out he's not right about everything. Here's a cardboard box for your things."

This is only my opinion, but I think the reason Armen said it like he did was because by not making it an order he's giving Sean the option of not doing it, if he's not up for accepting the risk. However the risk was both of them could have got fired. Armen must have known people would know Python had been put on these machines and that he authorised it, in fact what's the point of putting it on them if nobody knows…

Exactly, so what is this Armen character getting out of this other than a potentially big amount of liability and unarticulated risk.

The OP said he told people openly that Armen told him he could do it when asked.

This makes no sense to me, what’s the upside to Armen? If he is business savvy, he needs to be gaining something in exchange for having his name thrown around by OP as signing off on this.

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#248

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At JPM, Athena: Walpole = Bob job runner Dagger = pixies Barbara = hydra The python 3 migration is still ongoing

Jesus I can imagine how difficult it is to migrate the whole solution to Python3.

Indeed.

Thankfully, I think it can be said the light is now strongly visible at the end of the tunnel on Python 3 (but it’s not completely done).

Re: An oral history of Bank Python

#250

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 joined the BAML grad scheme 10 or so years ago. We had a presentation from one of the Quartz guys and someone asked how they’d manage upgrading the version of Python. They were using something like 2.6.5. The whole move to 3.x was a thing. The Quartz guy just flat out said they wouldn’t upgrade. Seemed crazy to a new grad back then, but now I wouldn’t want to consider it either. Thanks for your contribution! It was…

A friend I've known since I first started on Wall Street now rides herd on the BofA Quartz libraries. One component of his job is to make developers aware of existing libraries they can use to solve business problems instead of reinventing the wheel. His theory of why they always have excuses not to do that is that they have no training in software development. They are still at the point in their learning where the are just excited that they can press keys on a computer and get it to do things they are barely able to understand.
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