Posted on Sat 15 November 2025 | Part 1 of Low-Latency Fundamentals | 12 min read
Every microsecond counts, but where do they actually go?
Tracing the journey of a message from the network wire to application code reveals how NICs, interrupts, syscalls, and runtimes introduce latency 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. Scaling these workloads requires different architectural choices, from vertical scaling to intelligent sharding schemes and specialized layouts for market data.
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.
Posted on Sun 12 October 2025 | Part 3 of Building Real Trading Systems | 35 min read
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 4 of Low-Latency Fundamentals | 12 min read
Ring buffers are a foundational data structure in low-latency systems. Their memory layout enables predictable performance and high throughput in real-time workloads such as trading engines, telemetry pipelines, and network processing.
Posted on Sat 20 September 2025 | Part 2 of Distributed Systems in Finance | 23 min read
Modern trading systems rely on message-oriented architectures to move market data, orders, and risk events between services with predictable latency. Delivery guarantees, broker architectures, and ordering constraints shape how these systems behave under load.
Posted on Sun 07 September 2025 | Part 1 of Distributed Systems in Finance | 10 min read
Traditional settlement takes days because banks cannot trust shared state. Canton Network addresses this with domain-based consensus and cryptographic privacy, enabling real-time settlement without sacrificing confidentiality.
Posted on Mon 03 March 2025 | Part 2 of Building Real Trading Systems | 9 min read
Low correlation between strategies does not guarantee independence. Hidden dependencies between trading strategies can create concentrated portfolio risk, especially during regime shifts where correlations suddenly converge.
Posted on Fri 28 February 2025 | Part 1 of Building Real Trading Systems | 5 min read
Provisioning cloud infrastructure is a common step when moving trading systems from local development to production. This guide shows how to deploy an Ubuntu 24.04 EC2 instance and connect it to Interactive Brokers.