From ZX81 game hacks to trading systems My first programming adventure was Z80 assembler on a Sinclair ZX81, mostly trying to make games easier to play. Somehow that led to paid work writing molecular-modelling software in Fortran, C, and C++ on minis, mainframes, and supercomputers. I eventually settled into FinTech: trading platforms, exchange connectivity, FIX Protocol, C++, Java, Go, Rust, and Swift. These days I spend a lot of time around DevOps, SRE, metrics, observability, and platform engineering. I never lost the games thread, though. I have been learning Rust by rebuilding classics I grew up with, and still enjoy hacking around with ESP32 boards when the soldering iron starts looking lonely. Outside computing, rugby has been a long-running thread: I played for years until my body made the retirement case then coached for a while, and now enjoy watching Harlequins from time to time.

Current orbit Implementing Docker Compose on Apple/Container Reliability engineering and observability Low-latency trading and FIX connectivity Rust, Go, Swift, Java, C, and C++ Classic 1980's arcade rebuilds ESP32 and small-board experiments Harlequins from the stands now and then

Tech Stack

Buy Me a Coffee If you like the projects here, a coffee or a comment keeps the caffeine and ideas flowing.

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Things worth a furtle

Metrics

Generated daily with lowlighter/metrics.

Metrics setup note

The workflow expects a repository secret named METRICS_TOKEN. Lowlighter recommends a GitHub personal access token because profile metrics need data that the repository-scoped GITHUB_TOKEN cannot always read.