Posted on Sat 06 December 2025 | Part 1 of Market Microstructure & Global Systems
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Posted on Sun 12 October 2025 | Part 1 of Financial State Machines & System Invariants
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.
Posted on Sat 04 October 2025 | Part 3 of Low-Latency Fundamentals
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.
Posted on Sat 20 September 2025 | Part 2 of Distributed Systems in Finance
Explore how message-oriented architectures power modern trading systems. Learn patterns, delivery guarantees, and broker trade-offs for high-frequency finance.
Posted on Sun 07 September 2025 | Part 1 of Distributed Systems in Finance
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.