Wire Formats for High-Volume Service Communication
Every microservice architecture faces a fundamental question: how should services encode data when communicating? The answer matters enormously at scale. When you’re …
Mechanical Snail
Methodically crawling through caches, concurrency, and chaos...at a paint-drying pace
Posts
Architecting AI-Driven Systems for Financial Markets
Financial markets generate petabytes of data daily: price ticks, order book updates, news feeds, earnings reports, social media sentiment, and macroeconomic indicators. Traditional …
Recommendation Systems Part 6: Advanced Topics & Future Directions
Part 6 of 6 | ← Part 5: Implementation Emerging AI Capabilities The architectures described in this article represent the current state of the art, but fundamental limitations …
Recommendation Systems Part 5: Implementation & Operations
Part 5 of 6 | ← Part 4: Ethics & Safety | Part 6: Advanced Topics → Case Study: Feed Ranking Architecture The following synthesizes public disclosures from major platforms …
Recommendation Systems Part 4: Ethics, Safety & Governance
Part 4 of 6 | ← Part 3: Production Systems | Part 5: Implementation → Ethical Considerations Recommendation systems shape public discourse and individual well-being. Responsible …
Recommendation Systems Part 3: Production Systems
Part 3 of 6 | ← Part 2: Ranking | Part 4: Ethics & Safety → Evaluation and Metrics Recommendation systems require rigorous evaluation across offline, online, and long-term …
Recommendation Systems Part 2: Ranking & Re-ranking
Part 2 of 6 | ← Part 1: Architecture | Part 3: Production Systems → Ranking Models The ranking stage scores candidates with a model trained to predict user engagement. Unlike …
Recommendation Systems Part 1: System Architecture & Feature Engineering
Part 1 of 6 | Part 2: Ranking & Re-ranking → Introduction Social media platforms generate value by connecting users with content they find engaging. The recommendation …
Building MCP Servers in Go: Social Media Graph Administration at Scale
Consider a social media platform with 8 million users facing a content moderation bottleneck: hate speech reports take 4-6 hours to reach moderators, and at scale—120,000 reports …
Building Neural Networks from Scratch in Rust: From Backpropagation to Production
In 2017, a fraud detection startup discovered their Python-based neural network inference was creating a hidden cost: 200 milliseconds of latency per transaction. At their …
Caching Strategies
Caching is a classical systems technique that reduces access latency by retaining temporary replicas of data closer to the point of consumption. A typical deployment comprises a …
AI-Driven Risk Management for Nordic Power Futures and GoO Portfolios
The Nordic power market is one of the world’s most liquid and sophisticated electricity markets, trading over 500 TWh annually across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. …
Engineering Low-Latency Trading Systems in Rust
In high-frequency trading (HFT), microseconds determine profitability. When an arbitrage opportunity appears—say, a 0.01% price discrepancy between two exchanges—it vanishes within …
High-Performance Architecture of a Social Media Platform
Modern social media platforms serve billions of users with sub-second latency requirements while handling massive write throughput and complex relationship graphs. This article …
Inside a High-Performance Time Series Database in Go
Time series databases (TSDBs) are specialized storage engines optimized for time-stamped data at massive scale. Unlike general-purpose databases, TSDBs exploit temporal locality, …
The Actor Model – Concurrency Through Message Passing
Introduction As modern systems evolve toward distributed, highly parallel architectures, traditional concurrency techniques—locks, mutexes, and shared memory—quickly reveal their …
High-Performance Vector Operations: SIMD, Cache Optimization, and Memory Bandwidth
In 2019, a quantitative trading firm discovered their portfolio risk calculation was bottlenecked not by algorithmic complexity, but by memory access patterns. By restructuring …
Building a DSL for Financial Derivatives Valuation in Rust
Financial institutions require precise, auditable, and performant valuation of derivative portfolios. This article presents the design and implementation of a domain-specific …