https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/Recent content in All Articles on Mechanical Snailhttps://mechanicalsnail.com/images/logo.pnghttps://mechanicalsnail.com/images/logo.pngHugo -- 0.152.2en-usMon, 24 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/wire-formats-rust/Mon, 24 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/wire-formats-rust/Choosing a wire format at scale: JSON, Protocol Buffers, Cap'n Proto, FlatBuffers, Avro and MessagePack compared on payload size, encode/decode cost, and schema evolution.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/ai-financial-agent/Sat, 22 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/ai-financial-agent/The architecture of production AI trading systems: data pipelines, feature engineering, prediction models, risk management and backtesting under adversarial market dynamics.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/columnar-storage-golang-financial/Wed, 26 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/columnar-storage-golang-financial/Building a columnar storage engine in Go: cache-friendly memory layout, fixed-point decimal arithmetic for financial precision, SIMD-friendly aggregations, and honest benchmarks.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/mcp-server-golang-social-media/Tue, 25 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/mcp-server-golang-social-media/Building a Model Context Protocol server in Go: JSON-RPC tool definitions, social graph traversal, role-based access control with inheritance, and idempotent moderation operations.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/neural-networks-rust/Tue, 18 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/neural-networks-rust/Neural networks from first principles in Rust: manual backpropagation, cache-friendly matrix operations, SIMD utilization, and where inference time is actually spent.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/caching/Fri, 14 Feb 2025 12:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/caching/A survey of production caching strategies: cache-aside, read-through, write-through and write-back, LRU and friends as eviction policies, and the consistency trade-offs each one implies.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/ai-nordic-power-risk/Tue, 10 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/ai-nordic-power-risk/Machine learning risk models for Nordic power futures and Guarantees of Origin portfolios: why historical VaR underestimates fat tails and how ML captures non-linear weather dependencies.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/low-latency-trading-rust/Mon, 02 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/low-latency-trading-rust/Engineering microsecond-latency trading systems in Rust: lock-free data structures, cache-line optimization, kernel bypass networking, and hot paths that never allocate.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part6/Wed, 10 Jul 2024 14:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part6/Part 6 of 6: foundation models, LLMs and multimodal understanding in recommendation — what changes once the ranker can actually read the content it is ranking.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part5/Wed, 10 Jul 2024 13:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part5/Part 5 of 6: a reference feed-ranking architecture — request flow, latency budgets, ads blending, two-tower retrieval and ranking implementations, and production monitoring.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part4/Wed, 10 Jul 2024 12:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part4/Part 4 of 6: amplification harms, filter bubbles, fairness metrics and the governance controls that keep large-scale recommendation systems accountable.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part3/Wed, 10 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part3/Part 3 of 6: running recommenders in production — offline ranking metrics, A/B testing statistics, distributed training, model serving and compression, cold start, and drift.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part2/Wed, 10 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part2/Part 2 of 6: ranking and re-ranking — pointwise, pairwise and listwise losses, Deep & Cross and Wide & Deep architectures, multi-task learning, diversity via MMR and DPP, and bandits.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part1/Wed, 10 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/recommendation-systems-part1/Part 1 of 6: the multi-stage architecture of a production recommendation system — candidate retrieval, embedding-based nearest neighbour search, and feature engineering at scale.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/social-media-architecture/Sun, 08 Oct 2023 13:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/social-media-architecture/Systems architecture for an Instagram-scale social platform: fan-out on write versus read, graph sharding, feed caching, and absorbing celebrity-tier traffic spikes.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/timeseries-database-go/Sun, 11 Jun 2023 14:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/timeseries-database-go/Inside a high-performance time series database in Go: LSM-style storage, delta-of-delta and Gorilla compression, inverted label indexes, and range query execution.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/actors/Sun, 17 Apr 2022 15:44:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/actors/How the Actor Model replaces shared memory with message passing: its origins in Erlang, supervision trees, mailbox semantics, and where actors fit in modern distributed systems.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/vector-optimization-simd/Fri, 11 Mar 2022 10:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/vector-optimization-simd/Why vector code is memory-bound, not compute-bound: cache-line behaviour, array-of-structs versus struct-of-arrays layout, AVX vectorization, and the bandwidth ceiling.https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/financial-dsl-rust/Thu, 29 Apr 2021 12:00:00 +0100https://mechanicalsnail.com/posts/financial-dsl-rust/Designing a type-safe DSL in Rust for valuing futures and forwards: the pricing mathematics, a typed expression language, and an evaluation engine for portfolios of thousands of instruments.