People turning up in hedge funds (i.e. much smaller) and trying to rewrite the bit of a bank they used to work in's equivalent of this article is so annoying.
An oral history of Bank Python (2021)
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Re: An oral history of Bank Python (2021)
#12I've seen similar inside large financial orgs - what struck me was how there are these huge amounts of people that spend their entire working life inside this alternate IT reality. It's not unlike SAP consultants where their skillset is tied to one company.
Also...these things tend to have fuckin terrible documentation. Good luck figuring any of this out. And you can't google it and your AI is just as lost as you
Re: An oral history of Bank Python (2021)
#13I think it is a pity they’ll likely never open source any of this stuff
Of course, financial institutions have a lot of “secret sauce” - such as financial models - you’d never expect them to release.
But this kind of underlying infrastructure isn’t really “secret sauce”
Re: An oral history of Bank Python (2021)
#14When first encountering these ecosystems and looking at the various pieces they contain, one may repeatedly ask: "why didn't they just use for this problem instead of writing this component/subsystem from scratch"?
The answer is often that the battle-hardened mature off-the-shelf solution did not exist at the time the code was written. You're doing software archaeology.
Re: An oral history of Bank Python (2021)
#15To the best of my knowledge much of this originated with SecDB/Slang at Goldman - SecDB (securities db I believe) being the object store and slang the somewhat quirky C like language that ran with it (also the only language I’ve used professionally that let you have spaces in the variable names). Some of the folk that built that (or worked on it) ended up at JPM and Merrill where they built the Python centric version…
JPM's version was Athena (not Alpha) [0]
[0] https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/managing-python-at-scal...
Re: An oral history of Bank Python (2021)
#16When first encountering these ecosystems and looking at the various pieces they contain, one may repeatedly ask: "why didn't they just use for this problem instead of writing this component/subsystem from scratch"? The answer is often that the battle-hardened mature off-the-shelf solution did not exist at the time the code was written. You're doing software archaeology.
That's only half the answer. These large investment banks' value-add is partly that they can integrate everything they know into these closed-world environments (kind of like a Smalltalk image), which is something that simply isn't done in the wider world because you can't accrete it out of smaller pieces and it doesn't make sense at all for smaller entities.
Re: An oral history of Bank Python (2021)
#17I think it is a pity they’ll likely never open source any of this stuff Of course, financial institutions have a lot of “secret sauce” - such as financial models - you’d never expect them to release. But this kind of underlying infrastructure isn’t really “secret sauce”
Morgan Stanley's version is open-source at https://github.com/morganstanley/optimus-cirrus , although I don't know how practical it is to actually run yourself. (They don't go quite as far as having the code itself be bitemporal and kept in the datastore, but most of the stuff in the article exists there)
Re: An oral history of Bank Python (2021)
#18> but the default ring is more or less a single, global, object database for the entire bank.
Is this really the case? I'm sure there are plenty of transactions that for umpteen different reasons must not be exposed on a global level.
Re: An oral history of Bank Python (2021)
#19I think it is a pity they’ll likely never open source any of this stuff Of course, financial institutions have a lot of “secret sauce” - such as financial models - you’d never expect them to release. But this kind of underlying infrastructure isn’t really “secret sauce”
> I think it is a pity they’ll likely never open source any of this stuf
The more they use cloud-hosted LLMs, the more likely it will get leaked into training data.
Re: An oral history of Bank Python (2021)
#20I think it is a pity they’ll likely never open source any of this stuff Of course, financial institutions have a lot of “secret sauce” - such as financial models - you’d never expect them to release. But this kind of underlying infrastructure isn’t really “secret sauce”
Well I doubt these solutions are very useful outside; from what I read what they have is a universal data store (that isn't hard to implement using current off-the-shelf OSS), something for financial instruments that has a compositional nature (you won't encounter much of that in the outside world), plus some other quirky features.