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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

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 able to rapidly figure out what their exposure was during the 2008 crisis.

Some of that team, lead by Kirat Singh went on to start Athena at JP Morgan and then Quartz. I met Kirat once, he was considered a bit of a rock star in the bank tech community. He now runs Beacon, which is basically Bank Python as a service.

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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/

I took a quick look, it seems like all the postings are London or New York. What's the feeling internally about remote hires? I'm assuming that's still out of fashion in finance and Beacon feels the same?

Because of Covid I've been remote since last year. It's still an evolving situation. But things have worked out pretty well.

Our CEO was also remote during that time too and here's him giving a webinar from a cabin :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXPDXbrPdxI&ab_channel=Beaco....

s/rockstar/primadonna

Build complex system, when things starts to get messy move somewhere else. Rinse, repeat.

As a full stack quant dev who is struggling to go all-in on Beacon: Do people generally like to use Glint for complex applications? Are benefits of Beacon lost when interfacing from e.g. Angular? I'm afraid that professional frontend devs might be unwilling to work with a proprietary framework, but that's speculation from my side.

Glint is an integrated framework with the platform but it does not limit you to just using the framework. The platform is designed to be as extensible as possible, worry not about being locked in :)

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.

Had a lot of fun pulling things out of MetaDir and recreating what seemed like "early history" of SecDB when I was there, was a lot of fun :D

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...

Interesting to be reading all this about SecDB. About 15 years ago I was offered a job working on SecDB (I forget exactly what the position was now). It and Slang sounded really interesting.

I do sometimes regret not taking the job because the people there were wickedly sharp and the tech sounded great, but in hindsight I'm not sure I would have thrived in a bank long term. I did a 3 month internship at Lehman's which I enjoyed, but I don't think I'd have suited a career in it. One thing I did get out of it was a total lack of fear around job interviews, if I could survive the 14 hours of interviews at GS and come out with an offer, then I can handle pretty much any recuitment process :)

It's amazing how a few people have left such a big mark on a part of the investment banking industry. I missed Kirat right before exiting BAML but met all his "disciples" and Dubno..including his miniature dinosaur and telescope in his office :). Very much felt like tech religion where no open debate on merits and drawbacks could be discussed. And a lot has changed in terms of engineering innovation with turnover since that era...

Why is the number of people who "left a big mark" so small?

1. An organization/industry can adopt each new technology only once. New technologies arise infrequently. Each time they arise, only a few people get to work on the projects introducing them. In other words, opportunities to leave a big mark are limited.

2. Credit for innovation is political capital. People hoard political capital and become powerful. They act as gatekeepers of innovation and take the credit for successful projects.

> 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.

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.

> 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 able to rapidly figure out what their exposure was during the 2008 crisis.

Correct. We used python for a bunch of infrastructure stuff (eg distributing all of secdb to all of the places it needed to go). The actual pricing and risk was written in Slang with a lot of guis that were "written" in slang but actually that caused autogeneration of JIT bytecode that was executed by a JVM. Most of the heavy lifting behind the scenes was C++. So a bit of everything.

My grandpappy always told me to cut out the middleman. Modern C++ was heavily influenced by the need to make it simple to use directly. If you are in the business of writing code instead of reminiscing, you can now leverage move semantics, lambdas, and smarter pointers to create software that is close to the silicon. Python might be great, but it sure is slow. Its success is founded on smart people making it easier for not so smart people to call C++ that does the heavy lifting.

A big force multiplier in the old GS secdb model was simply the speed of the dev cycle vs speed of the code. As a strat you could push slang changes to pricing and risk literally in minutes with full testing, backout, object audit logging etc.

C++ changes went out in a 2 week release cycle so changes were still fast by most standards but much slower. But yeah we had 20m + lines of C++ code so it was extensively used.

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