Interactive Writing

Articles that explain systems by letting you touch them.

I want these pieces to feel closer to a simulator than a blog. The goal is to make the logic behind resilient systems visible, instead of only describing it after the fact.

Hardware Playground9 min read

A Tiny FPGA That Reacts To News

An interactive tour of a C++/FPGA toy that takes one news headline, lights up hardware trigger bits, and emits BTC, SP500, and 10Y reaction bps.

23 us

p50 headline to reaction packet

FPGAC++KV260LatencyMarket systems
Pick a headline and watch trigger bits light up
See BTC, SP500, and 10Y bps come out
Follow the CPU to FPGA handoff
Read article
Latency Engineering14 min read

Why std::unordered_map Can Be Bad For Latency

An interactive article about the cost of node-heavy hash maps, cache locality, flat hash maps, prefetch, and where Rust changes the default story.

6 demos

from buckets to prefetch

Hash mapsCache localityLow latencyHFTC++Rust
Build the obvious chained map
Watch cache misses pile up on lookup
Compare flat probing and prefetch
Read article