reflections
i am, slowly, piecing together writings from my previous blog, scattered documentation across platforms i've abandoned and returned to, journals from hostel nights, and projects documented in cryptic git commits. these traces go back to when i first discovered what code could build, through raspberry pi experiments that taught me infrastructure exists to serve people, not impress them. some writings are unpolished. that's intentional. —2024.11
a few notes from building the things on my projects page. more later.
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why i built a clearing engine i'll probably never run in production
i kept reading the phrase "the clearing house novates the trade" and realising i didn't actually understand it. so i built one — and learned that the correctness requirements shape the code more than the finance does.
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a backtest that ignores costs is fiction
the first version of every backtest i wrote was a lie. adding the indian cost model — and making point-in-time correctness structural — quietly killed a lot of "strategies". good. they were never alive.
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i wrote a vm manager in c on purpose
i could have built vmmanager in an afternoon with electron. instead i wrote it in c against libvirt and the incus rest api — because the hard path is where you learn where the complexity actually lives.
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rust keeps making me slower, and that's the point
rust does not let me lie to it. it's the closest thing i have to a senior engineer reading over my shoulder — and it changed how i scope work: a small correct thing over a big handwavy one.
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building in public, even the unfinished and the archived
most of what's on this site is open source, and a fair bit isn't finished. building in public means letting people see the seams. i'd rather show the workshop than the showroom.