Build it to understand it
I kept reading “the clearing house novates the trade” and realising I didn’t understand it. So I built one. The hard path is where the complexity actually lives.
Portfolio — MMXXVI
Open to work
Dharun Ashokkumar
I build the unglamorous infrastructure — clearing engines, virtualisation tooling, data platforms — the layer people only notice when it breaks. Mostly Rust, Python and C. Almost always in public.
- Discipline
- Systems &
infrastructure - Based
- Tamilnadu,
India - Member
- The Linux
Foundation
Selected work
All projects- 01 Open Clearing Engine An NSCCL-grade clearing and settlement engine in Rust — novation, multilateral netting, SPAN margin, event-sourced and byte-for-byte replayable. Rust · Fintech · Event sourcing 2026
- 02 Indie Market Analyst A local-first Indian-market toolkit: deterministic intraday scanner, dashboards, and a backtester that carries the full Indian cost model. Python · React · NSE / BSE 2026
- 03 VMManager QEMU/KVM machines and Incus/LXD containers in one native GTK4 window. Written in C, ships as a single binary, no runtime to install. C · GTK4 · Virtualisation 2026
- 04 LPU Labs On-demand development environments a student can open in a browser tab — container orchestration hidden behind one button. FastAPI · React · Docker 2025
How I work
Three habitsSmall and correct beats big and vague
Rust makes me slower and surer. I’d rather ship tabular Q‑learning that works than deep RL that hand-waves. Scope is a design decision, not a compromise.
Show the workshop, not the showroom
Most of this is open source and a fair bit is unfinished. Building in public means letting people see the seams — including the archived experiments.
Reflections
All writing- — Linux Foundation, LFX, and a trip to Mumbai I didn’t pay for The payoff for years of quiet upstream work: code reviews, fixes, maintenance — and then a funded seat at the Open Source Summit. 2026.06
- — A backtest that ignores costs is fiction Adding the Indian cost model quietly killed a lot of my “strategies”. Good. They were never alive. 2026.05
- — Rust keeps making me slower, and that’s the point The closest thing I have to a senior engineer reading over my shoulder. 2026.05
Currently
Updated 2026BTech CSE at LPU
Lovely Professional University, Punjab. Learning the structured way — DSA, ML — while the projects teach me the rest.
Linux Foundation projects
Member, contributor and maintainer. LFX funded my travel to the Open Source Event 2026 in Mumbai, June 16–18.
Market & systems tooling
Point-in-time data platforms, a reinforcement-learning paper trader, and a clearing engine that refuses to drift from its golden file.