Writing
Occasional pieces about building and operating systems that handle money or data. Mostly about the parts that went wrong, since those are the parts worth reading.
Is this vibe coding?
I use AI to write code and would rather say so in the first paragraph. Why I left Computer Engineering for Electrical Engineering, why syntax errors fail loudly and judgment errors fail silently, and what I am accountable for regardless of what typed the line.
One contract, two sides
Why the backtester and the live trading engine share a single contract layer, what byte-identical scoring costs in design freedom, and why a disagreement between research and production would mean one of them is lying with no way to tell which.
A stale credential is worse than no credential
A fallback I had left in place served a two-month-old token quietly for weeks. It looked exactly like the broker revoking access. What it cost, why the fix was deletion rather than repair, and what that changed about how I store secrets.