architecture

Observability in the Hot Path: Logging Everything Without Slowing Anything Down

Your observability adds milliseconds. On a trading platform, that's not monitoring — it's a performance regression you chose to keep. Here's how we built observability that sees everything without touching the critical path.

The LLM Doesn't Know What It Needs

Good context isn't context that fits. It's context that's relevant. The difference between those two things is the gap most AI-assisted development falls into — and closing it requires intelligence, not arithmetic.

Chaos Engineering for the Rest of Us

You think your system is resilient. You've never tested it. The gap between what you believe about your system and what's actually true is where outages live — and you don't need Netflix's budget to close it.

Your Code Is Disposable. Your Decisions Aren't.

Every developer using AI has written a proto-ADR without knowing it. CLAUDE.md files, Cursor rules, copilot-instructions.md — they work because they provide persistent architectural context. The structured versions have existed for years.

Strangler Fig in Practice: Migrating Legacy Without the Big Bang

Everyone knows the strangler fig pattern. Few teams finish the migration. Here's what actually kills it — and the fixes that work.

Operating a Live Trading System: What Breaks and What Saves You

Operational failures kill more personal trading systems than bad strategies. What actually goes wrong at 3 a.m. — and the defences that earn their place.

Capital Safety Is an Architecture Decision

How Meridian — a personal crypto trading system — treats capital safety as a first-class architecture constraint, with defence in depth, state machines, and automatic emergency procedures.

Micro-Frontends: When to Split and When to Stay

Micro-frontends solve a real problem — but only if you actually have that problem. A practical guide to when the split is worth it, what the architecture really costs, and the pain points nobody warns you about.

The Invisible Architecture: How Culture Eats Strategy in Engineering

Incentives, information flow, and the norms that survive scaling — the invisible architecture underneath every engineering system you build.

Resilient by Design: What I Learned Building for Regulated Finance

Most engineers optimise for uptime. In regulated finance, that instinct will cost you. What I learned about failing hard, recovering deliberately, and building compliance into the architecture.

The Appropriate Level of Complexity

Over-engineering is a well-known sin. Under-engineering is the same sin wearing a different hat. The goal was never simplicity — it was the right complexity, designed to evolve.