Developer Diaries

Building a Rust Statistical Arbitrage Portfolio Bot

A pairs trading bot is not interesting because it computes a z-score. It gets interesting when you make multi-leg execution, research hygiene, and runtime honesty part of the strategy rather than cleanup work.

Can ICT and SMT Actually Work in Crypto?

Crypto does show timing effects, liquidity dislocations, and short-horizon mean reversion. That still does not prove the retail version of ICT and SMT survives fees, out-of-sample testing, or live execution.

Prerendering a Blog With Shiki

How this blog turns a folder of markdown into static HTML with build-time syntax highlighting, and the three things I had wrong when I first wrote it up.

Automating the Booking.com Extranet

Booking.com has a rates API that a single property cannot get at, so I drove the extranet with Playwright instead — a session I log into by hand, bulk edits instead of per-date writes, and a journal that makes an interrupted run resumable.

What a Go Scaffold Should Look Like

Keytide is an IAM service that doesn't exist yet, and revisiting it I found a layout I wrongly called standard, an auth middleware that validates nothing and admits it, and no wiring between the two.

Modelling Traffic Fines in Postgres

A fines system where the hard part wasn't the CRUD — it was deciding what an offence is, what a penalty was worth on the day it was issued, and who is allowed to say either.

Writing a unified Plugin for Code Blocks

How to wrap markdown code blocks in a language label and a copy button by rewriting the HTML syntax tree with a rehype plugin, and what the inline onclick actually costs you.

An E-commerce Site With No Framework

A shoe shop built from two HTML documents, three scripts and a JSON array, and what building a catalogue by hand teaches you that a component model would have hidden.

Audio State Is Not React State

An audio element owns playback state that React thinks it owns too, and since React 18 there has been a first-class hook for exactly that problem.

Reading Matrices From Files in Python

How to read a whitespace-delimited matrix from a text file and fail with an error that names the line number, and why that is most of the program.