Posted on Sat 07 February 2026 | Part 3 of DeFi Engineering | 18 min read
Blockchains are often explained through protocol-specific concepts like blocks or slots. This article reframes them as distributed state-transition systems, where ambiguity and delayed agreement exist to varying degrees across chains.
Posted on Sat 24 January 2026 | Part 5 of Distributed Systems in Finance | 17 min read
Modern trading systems rely on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) that branch, merge, and transform real-time feeds into many parallel consumers: matching engines, risk checks, analytics, surveillance, and storage. These ingestion DAGs exist to isolate failure, control fan-out, and preserve latency and correctness under extreme market conditions.
Posted on Sat 10 January 2026 | Part 3 of Low-Latency Fundamentals | 15 min read
Low-latency systems fail when work becomes unbounded. Batching, conflation, and backpressure are mechanisms that keep systems stable under bursty, adversarial load. Without them, tail latency and cascading failures are inevitable.
Posted on Sat 13 December 2025 | Part 4 of Distributed Systems in Finance | 22 min read
How do trading systems observe themselves in real time? This article breaks down the telemetry architecture that keeps distributed systems visible under extreme latency pressure.
Posted on Sat 06 December 2025 | Part 1 of Market Microstructure & Global Systems | 22 min read
Every modern exchange is a distributed database in disguise. This article reveals how trading engines transform chaotic streams of buy and sell orders into a perfectly ordered, replayable log, ensuring fairness, determinism, and market data reliability.
Posted on Sat 29 November 2025 | Part 2 of Low-Latency Fundamentals | 19 min read
Learn how to pinpoint where time disappears in Python systems, from CPU and I/O bottlenecks to Prometheus metrics and continuous profilers. Explore the tools that turn raw measurements into observability dashboards revealing real performance patterns.
Posted on Sat 15 November 2025 | Part 1 of Low-Latency Fundamentals | 12 min read
Every microsecond counts, but where do they actually go?
This article traces the hidden journey of a message from the network wire to the application's code, revealing how the NIC, interrupts, syscalls, and runtimes introduce delay at every hop.
Posted on Sat 08 November 2025 | Part 2 of DeFi Engineering | 15 min read
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.
Posted on Sat 01 November 2025 | Part 3 of Distributed Systems in Finance | 12 min read
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.
Posted on Thu 23 October 2025 | Part 1 of DeFi Engineering | 14 min read
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.