I discuss in a previous post that Hi Stakes Market Game is under a feature freeze and I am ironing out bugs. One bug relates to asset valuations. Another terrible bug was related to my in memory db library that works like CQEngine. Those bugs were a catastrophic cascading probe, one compounded on another.

My In-Memory DB Library's bug was in the query planner specifically in the cascading probe where filters after two to be ignored and incomplete implementation of the necessary residual filtering. There were...

Hi Stakes Markets Game is now feature frozen. I should have feature froze sooner, but I needed to add support for the Bond Market. A financial simulator without the bond market is hallow. Bonds are debt instruments, it's how governments and corporations raise money to remain active. It's how investors can seek a stable cash flow rather than rely on fluctuations of the Equities and Derivatives markets.

Binary Options (Prediction Market) are more fleshed out and implemented now.  It's take all or nothing, so t...

Gemini 2.5 Pro March 2025 was the peak of Gemini. Ever since that, it's gone down hill. Somewhere around Summer '25 it regained some of that intelligence, but since Gemini 3 Pro Preview... yikes. Gemini 3 Pro is just not generally smart, it is so specialized and trash. You have to give it so much steering and explicitly tell it forcefully to stop going in a direction worse than any Gemini I have used.

It's really f**king annoying that they turned it into a coding LLM. That's not what the first 2.5 Pro was. T...

• GitHub: excsn/ironwal

• Crates.io: ironwal

For a while now, I've been diving deep into the foundations of durable storage. Every high-performance database or distributed system eventually needs a Write-Ahead Log (WAL): that critical, append-only record that ensures your data survives a crash. I wanted one that was deterministic, multi-stream, and above all, "battle-tested" against real-world failures. I mostly wanted one without write amplication, typically I would just build a logical WAL on RocksDB with FIFO ...

2025 was definitely something new, something different. 2025 was supposed to be the year of two financial related apps, but hah I failed at that. I failed because I discovered Gemini 2.5 Pro. 2025 didn't produce the two services I imagined, instead it culminated in the production of an entire ecosystem of open source MPL 2.0 licensed projects. It was a year where I produced far more than I ever imagined. There's no way I've would have been able to do all of this on my own in 10 or 20 years.

I've focused my a...

TL;DR: TypeScript + modern CSS, compiled straight to browser-ready ES modules,  no node_modules, no package.json, no bundler chain.

I just created and released Snapfire Compiler (snapfirec), a tiny Rust binary that turns your .ts + .css into browser-friendly .js and optimized .css, fast and predictable.

The problem (short)

TypeScript is fantastic, but the ecosystem isn’t. What should be a tiny, portable vanilla-JS library too often becomes a 200 MB node_modules mess, a dozen build plugins, and a bundler con...

I've been super focused on Hi Stakes and wanted to give another update on the world of Hi Stakes Game. The core simulation I talked about last time, the one that ticks on its own with economies that boom and bust, has continued to evolve. It's becoming more dynamic, more unpredictable and now it's ready for a new layer of strategy. This update is about two major features that bring players deeper into that living world: Contracts and Derivatives.

These aren't just new buttons to press; they're systems design...

I find the idea of building (also with) frameworks these days annoying and boring because of churn. The problem with building a framework is that you are not going to be building it for general use, only your use cases. Once you want to expand the scope of your framework because you had a moderately good experience using it in your last project, you'll find yourself wanting to expand things but in a way that breaks the old, so now you have churn.

It's funny because when you build with front end frameworks li...

It’s been a while since I’ve written a proper update, but this feels like the right time.
Hi Stakes Market Game is finally coming together and I’m aiming to have a beta available this November for both iPhone and Android.

At its core, it’s a game about markets but not just the charts-and-numbers kind. It’s about how economies move, how risk turns into opportunity, and how every boom has a bust hiding in it. The world inside Hi Stakes is alive: it grows, crashes, rebuilds, and surprises me even while I’m de...

For a while now, I've been working on a personal project that's been both a massive challenge and an incredible learning experience: a distributed, fault-tolerant database built from the ground up in Rust. I've been calling it SSK CASPAXOS DB, and I wanted to share some of the core ideas behind its design, the problems I tried to solve, and the cool features that have emerged from it.

No, it is not open source, I will be using it in my upcoming projects as I would have had to build some of these into the pro...