Scratching My Own Itch: Hello World

Why I am blogging again: 8+ years of breaking distributed systems, writing trading algorithms, and documenting rabbit holes in plain English.

Hello, world!

I’m getting back into writing. It has been a minute. But my notebook is overflowing with experiments, broken prototypes, and hard lessons that belong out in the open.

Here is the context: I have spent the last 8+ years as a Principal Engineer breaking things across backends, distributed systems, mobile apps, and automation scripts.

Most of what I know came from trial, error, and burning down production at 2 AM on a Friday.

Whether I am designing high-throughput services at my day job or running sub-second automated options scalping algorithms on the side, I fall down deep technical rabbit holes.

This blog is where I document those rabbit holes in plain English. No corporate fluff. No jargon for the sake of sounding smart. Just what broke, how I fixed it, and what I learned.

What to expect

I’m kicking off a series called “Scratching My Own Itch.”

The best engineering projects start because you have an annoying, specific problem that off-the-shelf software solves badly. So you fire up an editor and build it yourself.

In this series, we will cover:

  • Real tools, CLI utilities, and telemetry engines built from scratch.
  • Genuine experiments with GenAI, local LLMs, and agentic workflows.
  • Hard data from high-frequency systems and latency tuning.
  • Real-world distributed systems tradeoffs explained with everyday analogies.

Stick around. In the meantime, remember: Fall seven times, rise eight.

Light