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Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
- Improvotter 3y agoI've always been interested in these fintech APIs but wonder what competitive advantages the companies that build on this have compared to one another. What differentiates a company building on this from another company building on the same API? It seems like the execution would differentiate them the most? I feel like I am missing something here. Could someone enlighten me?
- renewiltord 3y agoI see. So this helps you build a Neobank or something like that. It's Mambu for the UK?
- teamspirit 3y agoWhy are these API banks always in the UK? I've been waiting to do my banking using curl for years and no one has made it available in the US.
- tazjin 3y agoIt's fairly common in Russia, too. Mostly because some "challenger banks" forced everyone else to modernise.
- edent 3y agoIn part because of the "Regulatory Sandbox" - https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/innovation/regulatory-sandbox https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/innovation/regulatory-sandbox
- venantius 3y agoActually, no - the regulatory sandbox cannot be used by prospective banks.
- ctdean 3y agoGetting a new banking charter in the US is hard, but it's straightforward to be a challenger bank in the UK. Jarvis moved (back) to London from SF to start Griffin. The banks in the US that have APIs tend to focus on large fintech partnerships, so even simple APIs will be expensive compared to a regular bank account. Grasshopper Bank in the US (for example) is one of the few that will do APIs on top of regular commercial bank accounts. (I work at Treasury Prime, which powers many US banks that do APIs.)
- venantius 3y agoIt’s hard in the UK too! Just not “infeasible” hard. (Plus, it’s easier to finance as you don’t have those pesky Bank Holding Company Act regs dinging your investors)
- ensignavenger 3y agoI see new banks popping up all the time in the US. I would enjoy seeing a comparison of the process in the US vs the UK.
- ghayes 3y agoDo you mean Neobanks that generally attach to existing banks through partnerships? The OCC nearly stopped granting de novo banking charters since 2008: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47014 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47014 (see Figure 1 on page 21)
- ensignavenger 3y agoNah, real banks, but I did some looking and it seems they have state charters rather than national ones from the OCC. What the implications of that would be are rather unclear to me, other than that state banks are regulated by both the state and the FDIC, and national banks are regulated by the OCC.
- downWidOutaFite 3y agoUK has government mandated API requirements for banks. In the USA it's left to the "free market" which in practice means having to trust unreliable 3rd parties like Yodlee or Plaid.
- matt3210 3y agoLol plaid wanted my username and password for access to my bank for a third party. No way
- vermilingua 3y agoDoes anyone know why this is the case in Australia too? Is there a regulatory reason or is it just a matter of market size?
- ungamedplayer 3y agoIirc nab has an API
- orra 3y ago> Why are these API banks always in the UK? I can think of 835 million reasons: https://www.reuters.com/article/eu-rbs-britain/corrected-uk-agrees-1-1-bln-deal-with-eu-to-settle-rbs-state-aid-concerns-idUSL9N1JB01D https://www.reuters.com/article/eu-rbs-britain/corrected-uk-... Plus, Open Banking and Faster Payments (which were EU initiatives before Brexit) maybe helped.
- blibble 3y agofaster payments had nothing to do with the EU "open" banking did (and accordingly you have to be a large company to participate at all)
- j16sdiz 3y agoInstant interbank transfer is basically everywhere[1] - China, India, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc... [1] https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2022/English/wpiea2022228-print-pdf.ashx https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2022/Engli...
- sumek83 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area
- blibble 3y agoyes, the EU launched a separate instant payment scheme a decade later doesn't mean the EU had anything to do with the UK's domestic faster payments scheme (SEPA is also euro only)
- orra 3y agoI was thinking of PSD (the original one), but it turns out that only required end of next business day settlement.
- avianlyric 3y agoU.S. banking is surprisingly far behind the curve, and hasn’t led the world from a tech or innovation perspective for many decades. The UK on the other hand has actively encouraged new banks and new tech. It’s had things like instant, free, payments between personal accounts for almost two decades. Contactless transactions for at least a decade, mobile banking for decades, and government mandated banking API for almost 5 years. In short, the UK has a very active banking sector that’s been rapidly (for banks) innovating for many decades. So the environment and ecosystem are well developed for further and faster innovation. In the U.S., it seems banks gave up on tech innovation decades ago, and decided that innovation in fees and punitive treatment of customers was their preferred approach. As a result there just isn’t an environment for new innovation, the incumbents find it much easier to crush competition, rather than compete. Why the same isn’t true in UK (which until recently had remarkably few distinct banks), is probably down to the nature of law and regulation, which gives customers lots of rights, and actively punishes banks that don’t uphold them.
- BurningFrog 3y agoUS banks are very tightly regulated, and the regulators haven't ordered these inventions yet.
- avianlyric 3y agoU.S. bank regulation is a joke compared to the UK and EU. Regulation isn’t the reason US banks are lagging so far behind.
- scarby2 3y ago> It’s had things like instant, free, payments between personal accounts for almost two decades. Thanks for making me feel old I was thinking "it hasn't been anywhere near that long, I remember the rollout like it was yesterday". Turns out that rollout was 15 years ago.
- 8fingerlouie 3y ago> The UK on the other hand has actively encouraged new banks and new tech. It’s had things like instant, free, payments between personal accounts for almost two decades. Contactless transactions for at least a decade, mobile banking for decades, and government mandated banking API for almost 5 years. I think most of those things are EU initiatives, which the UK was a member of at the time. At least we have all of them in Denmark as well.
- matt3210 3y agoYes! I need an api bank for personal use too!!
- seabass-labrax 3y agoAfter the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent succession of banking scandals, in which the taxpayer bailed out multiple prominent banks, the UK's government at the time introduced a series of measures to promote smaller banks. For individual personal accounts, Monzo and Starling are probably the most well-known of these so-called 'challenger banks'[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_bank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_bank
- harel 3y agoFurther more, banks that were bailed out signed a deal to actively help those smaller banks by transitioning clients to them. I know that because my bank offered me a few times to the point of nagging to switch my business accounts from them to one of the smaller ones. They offered to pay me a sum of a few thousand pounds to do that. I declined at the time due to me liking my bank and appreciating one app for all my business and personal accounts. When I pushed why are they willing to pay me large sums to leave them, the told me the above.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoI learnt about this situation, as it happens, from the founder of Griffin, so was particularly interested in this blog post. It seems like the initial excitement of developing a banking system in Clojure might have transitioned to more bread-and-butter aspects of banking now, but immutable data is an ideal match for their mandatory audit trails. I have to admit that I wouldn't mind being paid a large sum to switch to Griffin, but then again, my current provider is one of the more responsible ones which didn't have to be bailed out in the crisis :)
- harel 3y agoThere are benefits to being with irresponsible banks :-)
- rkeene2 3y agoHi. My company, Keeta [0], is making this available in many countries, including the US. [0] https://keeta.com/ https://keeta.com/
- j16sdiz 3y agoIt's not. Doing payment or wire transfer is not same as being a bank in most country, even to the customers
- rkeene2 3y agoI have a bit more information than you on the topic. We provide bank accounts, this includes checking and savings in the US.
- sachin9 3y agoCan people from other countries opt for this bank account?
- rkeene2 3y agoHi. The short answer is no. The way our system works, the legal address of the end-user determines which bank the bank account is within -- this is largely due to regulatory requirements within the various banking systems. There is one mechanism by which this could potentially be done from my understanding, but it will take us a few years to fully explore and integrate into that kind of model. Another model we explored (but again, do not implement) is that instead of holding end-user funds in FDIC-insured bank accounts (in the US -- bank accounts in other countries are not FDIC insured) is treating the funds as a security backed against deposits, which is significantly different, but could make non-US users able to open US-based accounts, but they would not at that point be bank accounts.
- nwatson 3y agoThe UK is friendly to money-laundering, presenting the more respectable faces of an international network of questionable banks and financial institutions. API banking will allow a faster cycle of wash, rinse, repeat, an innovation in shady.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoWe shouldn't avoid making finance easier and more efficient simply because it might make criminals more effective by the same ratio!
- jwr 3y agoThe US banking world seems to be firmly stuck in the 80s and banks need to be dragged kicking and screaming to implement anything recent, so this doesn't surprise me at all.
- hbcondo714 3y agoNow there's https://column.com https://column.com as discussed here last year: Column – a chartered bank for developers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31109170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31109170
- richardw 3y ago67m people in UK in a far more homogenous market. US is a lot more complicated, has a lot more legacy and more parties to get anything done. See e.g. the sluggish move to chip and pin, sluggish death of checks, slow move to real-time payments. Hard to turn a supertanker with many states and thousands of banks.
- mfreeman451 3y ago[dead]
- yuumei 3y agoUnfortunately in the UK a bank can (and do) freeze your account with no reason for up to 2 years without any recourse or access to funds. With API access you risk your money being frozen due to automatic fraud detection. The government have given up policing of finance to banks and they take the least risky options
- fabianhjr 3y agoAnd in the US they got civil forfiture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United... > To get back the seized property, owners must prove it was not involved in criminal activity. Some cases: https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-2/grading-state-federal-civil-forfeiture-laws/irs-cleans-out-bank-accounts/ https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-2/grading-state-fe... https://prosperityeconomics.org/stolen-savings-civil-forfeiture-banks-unsafe/ https://prosperityeconomics.org/stolen-savings-civil-forfeit...
- dataangel 3y ago> In 2015, Eric Holder ended the policy of "adoptive forfeiture", which occurred "when a state or local law enforcement agency seizes property pursuant to state law and requests that a federal agency take the seized asset and forfeit it under federal law" due to abuse.[21] Although states proceeded to curtail the powers of police to seize assets, actions by the Justice Department in July 2017 have sought to reinstate police seizure powers that simultaneously raise funding for federal agencies and local law enforcement.[22] basically Obama got rid of it then Trump put it back then Biden didn't anything
- downWidOutaFite 3y agoYour first link says the IRS stopped doing forfeiture of bank accounts 9 years ago.
- varispeed 3y agoThese "challenger" banks are a gimmick. Friend of mine recently tried to set up an account for his new business and all "challengers" refused a business account, they were slow to respond and disinterested in helping. Eventually he set up with a high street bank, but the whole thing took over a month, which is ridiculous.
- oldtownroad 3y ago“By law, fintechs must work with a bank to do these things, and right now that means a legacy high street bank with mainframes. Griffin is the bank plus technology platform that all future fintechs would build on.” Did they write this in 2016? The market has moved on. Griffin looks neat but they’re years behind many others, a nice API for banking exists from well established players, like ClearBank. There’s room for more so it’s great to see Griffin join the market but I hope their pitch isn’t this weak.
- varispeed 3y ago> that all future fintechs would build on This also sounds awfully like a single point of failure and embodiment of what's wrong with late stage capitalism - where competition is an illusion.
- ehhthing 3y agoI'm confused by this statement. fintechs aren't just proxies for banks, they're financial products that people want to use. There are plenty of cool and innovative things you can do with just a banking API beyond just creating another bank Sure the costs for any fintech using these products are the same, but they can offer a million different types of products which make them unique.
- varispeed 3y agoThen company underpinning those fintech businesses decides to pull the plug and suddenly everyone finds themselves up in a creek without a paddle.
- ehhthing 3y agoThis is true for basically everything powered by an API. I mean if you want to start your own bank and deal with compliance then sure do that! I don't see your point here, there is no sensible alternative to this problem.
- 3y ago
- howmayiannoyyou 3y agoIts not clear there will be small banks in the US to use this tech in the future. Here's why: 1. Deposit flight. Small banks are struggling to attract deposits at a time when money markets pay considerably more than deposit accounts. 2. Investment scarcity. Small banks are struggling to find places invest deposits where returns are safe, on a reporting adjusted basis. Meaning, small banks invest(ed) in US Treasuries, but as the Fed has rapidly hiked rates, the mark-to-market value of these investments has declined (though the funds are safe). The same can be said of new lending, which has similar problems due to credit risk, primarily in commercial real-estate. 3. Perceived risk. Rather than allow depositors to purchase additional FDIC insurance (above the $250k limit), which insurance would generate revenue for the FDIC and banks, the USGOV had done nothing. If you want to insurance excess deposits you must use an IntraFI account that spread deposits among different banks, and/or brokered CD's which does the same for that banking product. Both are higher friction, and both prevent instant access to funds - regardless of one's tolerance for penalties. 4. FISERV missteps. Small banks rely on Fiserv and a few other vendors to for back office and retail banking systems. In Fiserv's case their software is well behind big bank products that provide more features and easier user interfaces. Younger banking customers prefer big bank systems. 5. Regulatory overreach. Complex issue, but in sum its not clear bank regulators understand the banking business, or if they do, that they have any flexibility. By way of a few examples, its not clear to me regulators understand the safety & utility of brokered deposit use by small banks; the worthlessness of many bank capital asset appraisals, or the immense risk real-estate heavy loan portfolios are facing. 6. Asset-based lending death. Pre-2008 one could borrow against many types of capital assets, allowing businesses to purchase those assets with, say, 20% down. The asset secured the loan, with little or no reliance on personal guarantees or recent cash flow analysis. This practice led to problems in the 2008 GFC, but instead of tweaking the approach, lenders and regulators simply eliminated asset-based lending. When I write 'eliminated' I fully understand its still advertised as a lending product, but underwriting is reliant on cash flow, personal financial statements, and other factors that make 'asset based lending' a marketing term, not reality. This was profitable business for banks and didn't need to die. More threats lie ahead for small banks in the US. Folks in the know speculate USGOV prefers the Canadian model, where most deposits are held by several big banks. It might be the case FedCoin opens new possibilities for small banks, reducing Fiserv and friends hold on small banking business. One can always hope.
- vichle 3y agoMaybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like there's a strong case for Erlang/Elixir rather than Clojure? They kinda built BEAM on the JVM, no?
- jsyolo 3y agoThey tried really hard to not use a distributed SQL database.
- venantius 3y agoBecause it’s not a great fit for an event driven architecture.
- adampk 3y agoYes it would be very hard to make a bad technology choice when you thought through the whole system
- tadfisher 3y agoAs long as your balance is eventually consistent, what's the harm? ;)
- lifty 3y agoThey specifically mention why they went with FoundationDB, and that is because it's strictly serializable.
- dataangel 3y agonothing like having dynamic types manage your money
- ilikehurdles 3y agoWhile I also love to take part in cargo cults, you should probably fit some good blinders on before looking over at Nubank’s stack.
- ilkhan4 3y agoI wish people would stop bringing up Nubank when it comes to Clojure/FP as if it's some sort of mic drop that proves that it's the Right Way to develop financial software. When you have to keep bringing up the same example, it's not a very good argument.
- mvc 3y agoThere are always going to be niche langauges and mainstream languages, and as a result, users of niche languages will always have to "justify" their use of such. To investors, to potential new users, to potential colleauges. They're not having a bash at $your_favorite_langauge. Or suggesting that nubank couldn't have been built on any other platform. They are simply responding to the oft-stated question "are there any examples of it working at scale". What do you care whether it's "the right way" to develop any kind of software? "Clojure" was in the title. If you don't like Clojure, skip along to the next article.
- ilkhan4 3y agoSure, I get that they have to justify themselves, but when the answer to that question is (almost) always "Because Nubank!" for the past 10 years it doesn't feel like much of a justification.
- bnert 3y agoIn OO languages (Java, C#, C++, etc...), and functional ones (F#, Haskell, OCaml, etc...) types do not validate the correctness of logic, they evaluate the correctness of data structures and their access/mutation as they are manifested in the language. OO languages consider data correctness as access patterns of encapsulated primitives (or other data structures) through defined behaviors on a "class". Functional languages consider data correctness as access patterns which preserve previous version of data which a caller may still need to reference, or another part of the system references. Functional languages (in most cases) disallow direct mutation without some sort of immutability or persistence. Types have little (or nothing) to do with program correctness, or data correctness as it relates to external storage engines and their concurrency guarantees (i.e. FoundationDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc...). Therefore, in this scenario, what matter's most is the correctness of underlying storage (including the rigor of validating expected behavior) and the event sourcing/messaging systems, not on the internal data structures and their idioms conveyed by the language.
- xyst 3y agoDespite the unpopularity here. I am still a fan of cryptocurrency as an alternative to traditional banking.
- dsco 3y agoCryptocurrency is also even better than Clojure at being auditable as everything is on-chain all the time.
- refset 3y agoIf you're looking for something novel that combines crypto and ~Clojure, look no further: https://convex.world/ https://convex.world/
- jokoon 3y agoUnless finance institutions and laws can protect wallets and insure crypto, I will never use it. Currency is not just a number you move around, currency is deeply intertwined with how civilization works, and it requires a high amount of trust for people to use it. Trust is rather a social concept that something you can really prove mathematically. It's collective trust. Unless you can DRASTICALLY reduce mis-use with bitcoin, no one with trust it ever without a lot of expensive protective measures. A 1 hour lecture from a security professor on crypto currency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9nv0Ol-R5Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9nv0Ol-R5Q Something else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AAUrMuMPlo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AAUrMuMPlo
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoI don't understand why this would be a serious impediment. Suppose you go to an online exchange or Bitcoin ATM or local man with a crypto wallet, you hand over five $10 bills or transfer some money from your bank account, you get $50 in cryptocurrency. Now you go to the adult bookstore's website and don't have to give them your name, you send $20 to your friend in a foreign country so she can get a cab to the airport without having to lose another $15+ to a wire transfer fee, or you just use it to pay for parking. Even if you screw up entirely, the most you're out is $50. But then nobody is tying your literature preferences to your name, you can do your friend a favor more efficiently, and the credit card company doesn't have a database of where and when you park your car. The trust issues come when you want to be a speculator holding a large amount of wealth in a form someone could steal by breaking into your computer, but what does that have to do with using ordinary amounts day to day as a currency?
- fuddle 3y agoIt's pretty cool to see that the two founders wrote a book together: "Learning ClojureScript" https://www.packtpub.com/product/learning-clojurescript/9781785887635 https://www.packtpub.com/product/learning-clojurescript/9781...
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI see that the third author of the book was Allen Rohner. I worked with him at Compass Labs, an incredibly talented developer! He also founded CircleCI.
- nathell 3y ago> and this additional proprietary thing that I really need to open source (I ported Datascript to FoundationDB). Yes please! I wonder how that plays out as an alternative to Datomic.
- gremlinsinc 3y agothe whole article read to me like a guide: How to over engineer a project for kicks and giggles.
- adampk 3y agoIt clearly explained what the design constraints were and why the technology choices met them
- n42 3y agohow would you under engineer your bank?
- weird-eye-issue 3y agoYou don't have to choose between under and over engineering
- danpalmer 3y agoPerfectly engineering is nearly impossible. In my experience systems always end up under or over engineered. The distinction also depends on what's on the backlog – if you have a feature that's going to be hard to implement because of inflexibility, you're under-engineered, if it's easy but other features require more work than they should, you're over-engineered. I can't make a judgement call on whether they're over or under engineered, but it's good to pick which one you would rather be, write that into your engineering team's DNA, and then learn to work with it.
- n42 3y ago
- Lyngbakr 3y agoJames Trunk, who is now Griffin's VP of Engineering, gave one of the most clear and enjoyable technical introductions to Clojure I've seen. Recommended! https://youtu.be/C-kF25fWTO8?si=PnjMNLdBLJ8zqSu- https://youtu.be/C-kF25fWTO8?si=PnjMNLdBLJ8zqSu-
- phist_mcgee 3y agoThat was an incredible video, thanks!
- gremlinsinc 3y agoI absolutely hate when an articles starts out with: > IN A STARTUP, YOU SHOULD BE USING THE MOST POWERFUL LANGUAGE YOU CAN, AND THAT IS CLOJURE. says you. one opinion. in a startup you should use the language that your team can build and launch your MVP the fastest so you can get your first customers or funding. Hell, this could be a low code or no-code platform(probably not in fintech, just saying with startups in general). I mean, I'd say Python is the most powerful language because of LLMs and machine learning and generally I'm a PHP dev. Python also is about to get a ton more powerful with mojo which supposedly makes Python 36000x more performant. However, I would never tell someone x is the most powerful language and only one to use for a startup because that's a total lie and opinion.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoThat catchline makes a lot more sense when you consider that JUXT is the most prominent company specialising in Clojure aside from Nubank itself, and have their logo at the foot of pretty much any conference remotely touching on Clojure topics. Clojure has a fairly insular community that overlaps with other lisps more than it does something more popular such as Python or PHP, so the cliché (admittedly, one with some truth in it) that Clojure is the most powerful language might be surprising to someone who doesn't use it. We Clojure developers are used to it though, and stating our presumed superiority is almost a greeting at this stage!
- tacker2000 3y agoyawn I’ve seen a few other projects around here that boasted about using clojure because “we are the smartest and clojure is best and everything else is dogshit” Doesnt make your insular group look inviting or synpathetic at all to be honest…
- waffletower 3y agoI get it. I am a Clojurist that works for a fairly sizable company where Clojure is dominant (there actually are many, not just JUXT, you could also name Walmart). But I get annoyed when people substitute "we are the smartest and Rust is best and everything else is excrement" or especially "Typescript is best..." rofl
- Animats 3y agoWell, not yet. "The training wheels come off when we complete an audit, raise some more money, and finish writing the code. That should be Q3 or Q4 this year."
- davewritescode 3y agoHow does this compare with SoFi’s Galileo platform just in terms of feature set. The Galileo API is fairly rich so I’m wondering what’s different and potentially better.
- matt3210 3y agoFor businesses only it seems. I’d love a bank for personal use that was API accessible…
- twodave 3y agoAh, Clojure, native tongue of the devil himself.
- elwell 3y agoLol, what?
- SeanAnderson 3y agoIt's sort of difficult for me to envision what possibilities would be available to me with this tool. What user benefits are unlocked with seamless API access to a bank? Is it "just" something like Mint, but implemented in a more technically legit way?
- seabass-labrax 3y agoIf you have access to an API to process BACS transfers, you might be able to avoid having to pay percentage VISA or MasterCard fees. For any non-trivial sums of money, Griffin's fixed-rate pricing is rather competitive. The only real downside of transfers at the moment is needing the human in the loop, whereas card payments have already had fully automated platforms such as PayPal, Stripe and Opayo for many years.
- venantius 3y agoOur customers are other Fintech companies rather than normal humans :)
- kiitos 3y ago> The problem right now is that there’s no way to control the behavior of the underlying Java threading libraries, nio, and writing to disk. Nor will there ever be, just by the nature of those systems. You can't get deterministic execution from a system that uses non-deterministic request ordering, task scheduling, etc. -- which is what you get if you always use multiple OS threads, or spawn multiple discrete processes in tests, and so on. I mean, I guess you _can_ make that stuff deterministic, but it would require you to build synchronization points into every transition in your application state machines, in a way that would be controllable by tests, which is a very tall order! In practice, the only way to do this kind of thing is to design the core of your system to be fully synchronous, and to make it concurrent by adding concurrency at higher layers, expressed at run-time.
- dustingetz 3y agonever say never, i think maybe can be done with modifications to missionary, a structured concurrency dsl implementing process supervision for clojure/script. we already instrument missionary flows for testing missionary itself (asserting its state transitions)
- j16sdiz 3y agowell.. that is just a fancy way to insert synchronisation point. we useful, but not something limit breaking
- kiitos 3y agoI guess you're suggesting that you can build an abstraction layer (I guess you're calling it missionary) which (a) can reliably intermediate every interaction between a user program and any potentially non-deterministic API, and (b) can be configured at runtime as synchronous/serial/deterministic or async/concurrent/non-deterministic. Is this accurate? (If so, I'm pretty confident that this is infeasible.)
- dustingetz 3y agoElectric Clojure backends already get such effect supervision for free (you'll need to manually tag sync/blocking effects). https://github.com/hyperfiddle/electric https://github.com/hyperfiddle/electric https://github.com/leonoel/missionary https://github.com/leonoel/missionary
- ano88888 3y agowhich is a better or more productive language? Clojure or Elixir for web development?
- devgoth 3y agoI would argue that Elixir is due to Phoenix being a "batteries included" web framework....but as always: use the right tool for the job.
- refset 3y agoNot disagreeing, and it's only one aspect of Phoenix, but it might be of interest to someone reading that this LiveView-like Clojure library exists: https://github.com/tatut/ripley https://github.com/tatut/ripley Also this is a neat list of LiveView-like technologies across various languages: https://github.com/liveviews/liveviews https://github.com/liveviews/liveviews
- tacker2000 3y agoWhat does “batteries-included” mean? Except more buzzwords?
- hestefisk 3y agoCool they are doing this. How do you plan to make money on the deposit rates you have to pay to attract cash? Will you do lending via API as well?
- sroussey 3y agoIs this helping win customers?
- victorbjorklund 3y agoIt win over all the worlds 50 clojure devs for sure ;)
- yakshaving_jgt 3y agoImagine being fascinated by a JVM stack trace instead of frustrated that your online banking services are partially unavailable because of a software error.
- weird-eye-issue 3y ago"We kind of joke that we’re a tech company that happens to have a banking license." This is one of those quotes that can look really bad in hindsight if something goes wrong
- BillyTheKing 3y agoyea one of the things I've learned at Fintechs - all that Cobol code banks run on.. yes it's from the past and hard to maintain but it contains quite a bit of invaluable knowledge that you're bound to relearn if you rebuild.. And relearning in banking can be very expensive
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y agoI wouldn’t use a bank with this attitude. With a “tech company” label comes a lot of unjustified hubris based on an assumption that one is good at everything just because they write code. My employer called themselves an education research company that happened to use software to commercialise their findings. It sat a lot better with me and made for better culture in my eyes.
- donatj 3y agoI have been using Wells Fargo for almost thirty years and while I don’t know if it’s still the case, as recent as four years ago their passwords were case insensitive. I’ll take a little sane fintech in my banking please.
- philipwhiuk 3y agoWhy is case sensitivity in passwords important? If your answer is: because 62^8 (^12, ^16) is much bigger than 36^8 (^12, ^16) then I assume you don't actually know how people crack passwords, which isn't brute-force. If your system is capable of being brute-forced, you already failed, because there's no reason to give someone enough guesses that a brute-force approach succeeds.
- 3y ago
- hknmtt 3y agoIs there EU alternative? I mean bank that has API that looks like it was made in the 21st century? Except Wise and Revolut.
- maxehmookau 3y agoInteresting idea. This was the sales pitch that drew me to Mondo (now Monzo) but they ended up dropping their user-facing API almost entirely and replaced it with Open Banking APIs that aren't available to regular hobbyists. That said, looks interesting! Good luck!
- yladiz 3y agoSerious question, and I apologize for the strong language: why should I give a shit about the language a service I consume is written in? Why does it matter it’s in Clojure? I am professionally a Clojure dev so it’s cool to see something written in Clojure like this, but why should I care about that? This is one of the things I really dislike about the community. Yes, Clojure is a powerful language, and I really enjoy working with it, but I often feel that the community has some kind of imposter syndrome that drives the need to tell others and justify the use of the language in some project, and it’s weird.
- acdha 3y agoTypically it’s most important for languages which haven’t yet hit the level of acceptance that people still worry about being allowed to use them. I remember back in the 90s PHP and Python developers sharing examples like that because it answered business questions like “why aren’t we using Microsoft’s ASP?”
- bmelton 3y agoPeople think of Python as ubiquitous now, but forget how common it used to be for there to be articles titled things like "How to Convince Your Boss that Python is Good For Your Business" on HN and Slashdot back in the day
- VikingCoder 3y agoPerhaps you can send them code to execute server-side in a transaction? And so using their API means you have to develop in Clojure, too? Or they're trying to attract developers to come work for them?
- fnordsensei 3y agoThis is a blog post by one Clojure company, interviewing another Clojure company, with a tech stack focus. It’s not unusual within any language stack to have these kinds of blog posts - they’re obviously by and for people who find the technology interesting. I don’t get your point. Is this somehow not appropriate behavior amongst civilized society? Your remark comes across as not a little bit ignorant. Maybe you should just learn that if you “don’t give a shit”, you also don’t have to engage, and let the author write whatever they want.
- the_optimist 3y agoLooking for informed comments on FoundationDB datascript API. Is this identical to “distributed Datomic”? Does this maintain “time travel” capability?
- rkhacker 3y ago>If you had a database and some separate messaging like ZeroMQ, Rabbit, Kafka, you’re going to get race conditions. There’s always going to be a potential race where you have two messages - one is going to the disk and one is going to the network. If someone else is listening and sees both of them, they could potentially get them in either order. So it’s much, much simpler to just have one path. Foundation is really fast, so it works great. Having difficulty parsing this justification. How will a client code listening to an event get two events - one from network, and one from disk in case of any of the queuing systems mentioned here? I am also curious to know how the FoundationDB act like a messaging system apart more than a message store?
- n42 3y agoI think he's talking about how with FoundationDB, pub/sub notifications ("watches") are transactional – the notification is only sent if the transaction succeeds. because FoundationDB can guarantee transactions across multiple key writes, you can write your state at the same time you write an event/message/job somewhere else, in one transaction, with the subscriber only being notified on success. I think this is impossible(?) to achieve without the message queue and data store being the same service. otherwise, you have a transaction to write to your database and a separate call to the message queue, which introduces the race condition. https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/features.html#watches https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/features.html#watches
- kozzz 3y agoEvery time I see ZeroMQ being placed alongside RabbitMQ or Kafka as an example of a message queue system, it makes me wonder if the person who wrote that really knows what they are talking about. If they would rtfm they’d understand that ZeroMQ is more of a transport feature, that doesn’t really intersect with other mentioned projects in its features.