Who’s writing
I’m a software engineer writing Java in production at a high-frequency trading firm. The day job is the kind of work where a 2 ms GC pause is a missed market and the design of a queue can be the difference between making and missing the open. I came to it from regular backend engineering and the interests below reflect that arc.
What this blog is
Deep dives on the systems, languages, and tools that make latency-sensitive software work — and the broader ecosystem they sit in. Some of it is JVM-internal (ZGC, JIT, Loom), some of it is data-shaped (DuckDB, ClickHouse, Iceberg), some of it is networking and OS (kernel-bypass, eBPF), some of it is the trading-domain mental models I wish I’d had on day one (order books, single-writer designs, market microstructure).
Posts are deep, opinionated, and skewed toward what’s actually useful to know vs. what shows up in marketing material. Where I haven’t measured something I’ll say so. Where a “best practice” is mostly cargo-cult I’ll say that too.
How to navigate
- The Roadmap is a guided reading order. Foundations first, then five branches by domain (JVM, data, networking, trading, distributed systems), each layered from core to advanced. Recommended if you want to follow a path top-to-bottom.
- The Concepts at a glance page is a wider browse-mode index — short paragraphs on dozens of technologies with deep-dive links where they exist.
- Tag pages and the archive are linked in the navigation if you’d rather browse by topic or chronology.
Cadence
One or two longer posts per month, plus shorter pieces and the occasional “concepts at a glance” addition. Drafts often sit for a while before publication; if I’m writing about something it’s usually because I’ve actually been using it or have spent too long thinking about it.
Contact
Feedback, corrections, and suggestions for topics are welcome — particularly the “I think you got this wrong because…” kind, those make the blog better. (A contact method will be added here later.)