Nine years.Both sides of the market.
I build the infrastructure that markets run on, and the systems that trade on top of it.Most people do one. I’ve done both.
30 projects in financial markets since 2018, and one trading platform running 1,721 days straight.
A market has five layers. I have built on all of them.
Each band is a layer of a real market, as thick as the work that went into it. Each block is one system: as wide as it lasted, and as bright. Someone who has only written bots does not know what settlement costs; someone who has only built exchanges does not know how a strategy fails.
Read it top to bottom and it is one order’s life: a signal fires, it becomes an order, the fill returns as data, value settles, the chain records it. I have written every step of that path.
662 days that left a mark.
One row per year, one mark per day, 9 years deep. A lit day is a day I wrote something that went into a trading system or the infrastructure under one. The dark stretches are as true as the bright ones. This is a record, not a highlight reel.
Two instruments, never mixed. Green counts commits, amber counts minutes in which a file was written, and each is scaled against its own kind, so one import of 244 commits cannot make an ordinary afternoon look pale. Before 2021 there was no git: versions were folders with dates on them.
78 of these days had gone missing. Work disappears from a record like this for a dull reason: you edit the file again the next year, and a file only remembers the last time. Other days were written straight onto a server and left nothing on this machine at all. They were found in old backups and on the servers themselves, and they get no colour of their own, because a commit is a commit wherever it turns up. Each had to show three separate minutes before it counted, and anything a machine did on its own was thrown out.
Counted across everything I have built rather than markets alone, it comes to 1,423 days. The rest is other work. This is a record of one kind.
77 other things. None of them the point.
Nine years leaves a lot behind it: internal platforms, tooling, automation, a few products. It is real work and it is recorded, but it is not what I am claiming to be. One square is one project, brighter the longer it ran, laid out longest first, and unnamed until you ask.
The section above is the one that counts. This is only the evidence that the specialism was a choice.
Notes from building things.
Long-form, and kept honest. One is how I got here: years of code across trading engines, crypto infrastructure and automation at scale. The other steps away from the keyboard entirely, into the questions that do not have clean answers.
The Journey
Nine years read out of the repositories and the cold archive. Every figure computed, nothing estimated, and where the record is thin it says so.
The measured record~8 minRead the journey →
On the Edge of Knowing
Six questions that sit at the boundary of what can be known, each read through three layers, from what is solid to what is not.
6 questions~11 minEN · FARead the essay →