🔜 Coming soon: Understanding Latency: From Wire to Code

Dissecting the Infra of DeFi Protocols

Posted on Sat 08 November 2025 | Part 2 of DeFi Engineering

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Most DeFi discussions stop at smart contracts. This article goes deeper: through the data pipelines, executors, keepers, and coordination layers that make protocols run. If you're a software engineer, you'll see how DeFi architecture mirrors the systems you already know.


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What Database Scaling Looks Like When Milliseconds Mean Millions

Posted on Sat 01 November 2025 | Part 3 of Distributed Systems in Finance

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Financial systems process billions of time-series data points with sub-millisecond query requirements: constraints that break traditional databases.

Learn the architectural patterns that actually work: vertical scaling strategies, intelligent sharding schemes, and why market data demands different trade-offs than web applications.


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Introduction to DeFi Engineering

Posted on Thu 23 October 2025 | Part 1 of DeFi Engineering

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An introduction to the engineering landscape in DeFi protocols: the distinct engineering roles (protocol, infrastructure, execution), the complete technology stack from smart contracts to off-chain systems, core primitives like liquidity pools and oracles, and what makes building in this space fundamentally different from traditional fintech.


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How to Build Execution Systems for Crypto Trading at Scale

Posted on Sun 12 October 2025 in Trading Infrastructure

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How do you execute $100M orders across 10+ crypto exchanges without moving the market? This deep-dive covers the infrastructure behind institutional trading systems: market data pipelines, smart order routing, execution quality metrics, and building for failure.


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Ring Buffers 101: The Building Block of Low-Latency Systems

Posted on Sat 04 October 2025 in Low Latency

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An introduction to ring buffers, a foundational data structure for low-latency systems. We'll cover how they work, why they're fast, common variants, and practical use cases in real-time applications.


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Message-Oriented Architectures in Trading Systems: Patterns for Scalability and Fault Tolerance

Posted on Sat 20 September 2025 | Part 2 of Distributed Systems in Finance

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Explore how message-oriented architectures power modern trading systems. Learn patterns, delivery guarantees, and broker trade-offs for high-frequency finance.


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Canton: A Distributed Ledger for Global Finance

Posted on Sun 07 September 2025 | Part 1 of Distributed Systems in Finance

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Traditional settlement takes 2-3 days because banks can't trust shared state. Canton Network changes this with domain-based consensus and cryptographic privacy.

First article in our Distributed Systems in Finance series: we examine how Canton's distributed ledger achieves real-time settlement without sacrificing confidentiality.


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Building async_rithmic: A Modern Python Wrapper for the Rithmic Trading API

Posted on Mon 04 August 2025 in Quant Development

async_rithmic is an async-native Python wrapper for the Rithmic trading API, designed for building low-latency futures trading systems in Python. Learn how it improves on pyrithmic, integrates with modern event loops, and simplifies access to real-time market data, order placement, and account updates.


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SQLAlchemy In-Memory Performance: Faster Backtests with a Pure Python Database

Posted on Sat 10 May 2025 in Software Architecture

Discover how to improve SQLAlchemy performance using an in-memory database built in pure Python. We benchmark SQLite and introduce a faster SQLAlchemy in-memory alternative for backtesting and simulations.


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7 Python Built-in Functions for Code Optimization and Performance Tips

Posted on Sat 19 April 2025 in Quant Development

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Discover 7 Python built-in functions that every developer should know. These tips and tricks will help you optimize your code, improve performance, and write cleaner trading algorithms.


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