Notes on software engineering
Distributed systems, workflow orchestration, PostgreSQL and the things I learn building durable software.
1 in 1,200: How Rare Cyber Essentials Plus, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Really Are for Small UK Software Companies (2026 Data) Last updated 27 September 2026 · Cyber Essentials, Cyber Essentials Plus, ISO…
Happened at 4am, Friday night ;) I originally engineered provenance to solve a massive dependency resolution and version drift nightmare across the 260 plus private repositories that make up the…
Have you ever looked at a dashboard full of passing tests and felt a sudden wave of suspicion? You probably should.
Three sessions, one the trader, the other is the sentinel (chief financial officer) and the third one is the audit. here is the audit's comments on communication between dev team and the CFO.
A practical tutorial on passive market making — the trading method where you never predict the market, never chase a chart, and earn your money from the width of the spread.
On building a human-in-the-loop control plane for agents that can spend money, grant access, and delete things. — 0.
A technical and product review of Revolut's crypto exchange, from building an automated market maker on it — the documented behaviour, the undocumented behaviour, the arithmetic that decides…
- I should declare my position up front, because it colours everything below. I did not set out to build a container platform.
Bias declared up front, same as last time: TokenGate is mine. I designed it, I wrote it, I run it in production, and I have every commercial incentive to tell you it is wonderful.
On replacing GitHub Actions with something that owns almost nothing — and why that turned out to be the whole point.
disclaimer : AI helped me to generate most parts of the text and make it more readable. The Deceptive Nature of the Animal Kingdom: Instinct or Intent?
We used to have it relatively easy. When I first started paying attention to cybersecurity, malware was static. It was a specific file, with a specific "fingerprint" (hash).
The Bank-Grade, Postgres-Native Workflow Engine. Highway is a durable workflow orchestration engine designed for systems where data integrity is non-negotiable .
Code Agent Optimised Issue Tracker / Zero Dependency Context Aware Command Line Project Management 🤖 + = 🚀 I built a command-line issue tracking system for software development projects.
So this was this week's side project: issue-queue.readthedocs.io here is the workflow: I hope you find it useful.
Auth is a RBAC lib I started back in 2015, when I badly needed something simple and quick. Since then, developers have download it hundreds of thousands of times, indeed, Pyhton Software Organisation…
This is the classic "Castle vs. Moat" debate in security architecture. While Docker provides a Moat (isolation from the host machine), the Sandbox provides the Code of Conduct (rules for what happens…
I just noticed that I have missed a big point during the design phase of my workflow engine! I Leonard that, proper circuit breakers must have a durable state in a proper database.
- Transaction Boundaries are Sacred: When spawning child tasks, the parent MUST commit its transaction before children become visible to workers.
I've been working on Highway, a Strict Atomic Workflow Management System that handles massive amounts of log data from multiple concurrent processes.