How To Write Software In The Finance Industry

Here are some tips to help you write cutting edge software in the Finance Industry:

1. Store some of your configuration in properties files, some in XML files, some in the database, and some as static variables in your code.
2. Use reflection and dynamic proxies wherever possible. Where not possible, use byte code manipulation.
3. Never ever use assertions. Catch all exceptions and errors, and keep running. Don't ever send an error back to the user. Unless it's a NPE.
4. Log either nothing or everything. When logging everything, include verbose output from all your third party libraries.
5. Always wrap your exceptions. Log the stacktrace from your wrapped exceptions only.
6. Loosely couple all your classes using XML configuration. When you realize that you need to somehow call those classes, provide instance accessors using public static variables.
7. Re-invent the wheel as often as possible. Write your own ORM. Your own remoting. Your own cacheing. Your own GUI framework. Your own testing framework. Your own widget toolkit. Your own scripting language. Make up excuses and benchmarks to show why you needed to re-invent the wheel.
8. Make your code base as huge as possible. Include classes that were never used or tested. Use an abandoned experimental product to compile your classes. Make it impossible to compile in an IDE, and painful to compile from the command line.
9. Create many sophisticated disparate systems. Integrate by FTP. Using flat files with pipe delimited data.
10. User experience is not important. Create a slow, ugly GUI that uses a massive 2 gigs of RAM. Make 4 GB desktops mandatory for users.

Please feel free to add tips from your own experience.