Insights
Notes.
These notes are about building systems that can be trusted to act in markets: determinism and replay, how things fail and recover, what it takes to keep a record you can rely on. They concern how such systems are built and reasoned about, not what we research or how. Nothing here is published yet; the first subjects are listed below.
Determinism and replay
Why a system should be able to reproduce its own history exactly, and what that costs to guarantee.
Acting within known limits
Systems that hold when inputs fall outside what they can account for, rather than continue on assumptions that no longer hold.
The log as ground truth
Treating an append-only record of decisions, rather than a database, as what a system actually knows.
What ‘tested’ has to mean
The standard for testing when the cost of a defect is real rather than a failed build.
The engineering is the asset
Why the durable thing is the system itself, and why no single idea should be load-bearing.
One authority per fact
One authoritative record for each thing the system tracks, everything else derived from it, and why two ways to learn the same fact is a defect.