Reflections.
Short notes from building the things on my projects page — what I got wrong, what changed my mind, and what turned out to be harder than the docs suggested.
I’m slowly piecing together writing from an old blog, documentation scattered across platforms I abandoned and returned to, hostel-night journals, and projects documented in cryptic git commits. Some of it is unpolished. That’s intentional.
- 01 Linux Foundation, LFX, and a trip to Mumbai I didn’t pay for I’m a Linux Foundation member, contributor and maintainer — and LFX funded my travel to the Open Source Summit 2026 in Mumbai, June 16–18. The payoff for years of quiet upstream work. Linux Foundation · LFX · Open source 2026.06
- 02 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. Rust · Clearing & settlement · Event sourcing 2026.05
- 03 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. Backtesting · Point-in-time · Quant 2026.05
- 04 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. Rust · Design · Scope 2026.05
- 05 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. Open source · Learning in public 2026.04
- 06 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. C · GTK4 · Systems 2026.03