2026
- When to adopt the heavy machinery: thresholds, not opinions
"Adopt it when a measurement demands it" is useless until you name the measurement, the threshold, and the device you measured on. Here are …
10 min read
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- Local-first data: snapshots, deltas, and the two kinds of state
Most sync problems get hard because two kinds of data with opposite properties are pushed through one mechanism. Separate the slow-changing …
6 min read
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- Modularity and migration: cutting boundaries that survive
Module boundaries end up mirroring your org chart whether you plan them or not. The useful criterion isn't layers or file types — it's …
6 min read
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- Order reliability: idempotency, unknown states, and reconciliation
Exactly-once delivery does not exist. For an irreversible action like an order, that impossibility forces a specific design: a key minted …
6 min read
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- Real-time data pipelines: push, backpressure, and conflation
A price feed is not a fast API. It is an unbounded stream whose consumer is slower than its producer, which makes backpressure the central …
7 min read
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- Trading app architecture: six constraints and what they force
A trading client's architecture is mostly settled before you choose a stack — by data rate, irreversibility, catalog size, platform count, …
6 min read
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- Building is the most respectable way to procrastinate
There is a kind of work that feels exactly like progress and is, in fact, the most expensive way to avoid it. It ships, it has commits, and …
7 min read
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- Survival is a constraint, compounding is the objective
Reading is long-term. So is building something and putting it out. So is earning some cash first. When every option is defensible, judgment …
5 min read
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- Why building substitutes for progress: a first-principles analysis
The companion essay asserted that building disguises avoidance as progress. This one derives it — from five premises that are hard to deny — …
9 min read
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- The failure of good decisions
Half-formed.
1 min read
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- Systems thinking, edge case
A doubt I have not resolved.
1 min read
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- Why real learning is reconstruction, not input
We don't absorb knowledge. We rebuild it — piece by piece — in the mind. The illusion of input is the deepest failure mode of modern …
2 min read
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- What the Ising model teaches about complexity
A simple model with rich behavior — and a lesson in emergence that transfers to markets, opinions, and any system of locally-interacting …
3 min read
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- Investing is not prediction, but understanding constraints
Durable results come from knowing the game, not forecasting the score. A short essay on why constraints, not goals, define every system …
3 min read
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