ORM is Evil, but I Have No Proof

A Confession During Therapy I use ORMs. Every day. For years. Sometimes I even think they’re convenient. Forgive me, Father, for I have mapped. Last week I actually muttered “let the framework handle it” with a straight face – that’s when my team staged an intervention. My therapist suggested I write down my feelings instead... Continue reading

Taming the Thread Zoo: Building Lock-Free, GC-Friendly Concurrency in Kotlin

Grab a chair, refill your caffeine reservoir, and let’s talk about that four-letter word we all pretend not to hate: lock. You know the drill: everything runs fine in staging, but the moment real traffic turns up, a single hot lock starts playing king-of-the-CPU-hill while your tail-latency graph draws modern art. At that point management... Continue reading

The TTL-Driven Coroutine Cache: Because Life Is Too Short for Stale Data

I decided to publish some interesting libraries I develop for internal experiments – after all, one can only watch their side projects gather dust for so long before letting them roam free on GitHub. This time, I want to show off a TTL-based in-memory cache for coroutines, complete with a neat annotation-based code generation trick... Continue reading

Ultra-Precise Time-Synchronization & Timestamping in Kotlin

Continuing my saga of posts about squeezing every last drop out of Kotlin like it’s an overripe lemon of potential. 🥴 Just a friendly warning: don’t even think about using this in production until you’ve at least test-driven it in a few less judgmental environments. You know, like staging, or your cat’s laptop. Nothing says... Continue reading

Building a Sub-100 µs Matching Engine with Kotlin Coroutines

In the world of high-frequency trading (HFT), every microsecond counts. Small inefficiencies can quickly snowball into significant costs or missed opportunities. With Kotlin’s robust coroutine model, we can harness lightweight concurrency to power a matching engine that can respond within sub-100 microseconds. In this post, I’ll walk through the design considerations, coroutine architecture, and performance... Continue reading

Database Denormalization: Boosting Performance, Managing Trade-offs, and Best Practices for Implementation

Every database purist has a moment of crisis when they consider denormalizing perfectly clean, 3NF-compliant data. We spend so much time in university or reading blog posts being told “Don’t Repeat Yourself” or “No duplication in the database!” that the very thought can feel like sacrilege. Yet here we are, about to talk about intentionally... Continue reading