Hello, and what I'm writing about

After twenty years building trading systems, founding a startup, getting acquired, and now starting Mirador, I’ve never made the time to write any of it down in public. This is the start of fixing that.

A few threads I keep returning to:

• Distributed systems — what it actually takes to run real-time platforms when latency, correctness, and operability all have to coexist. Streaming stacks, event-driven design, and the boring parts (idempotency, backpressure, ops) that decide whether the thing survives.
• AI engineering — what changes when LLMs are first-class infrastructure, not a feature bolted on. I’m building AI-driven CI/CD at Mirador today and learning fast.
• Leadership — going from staff IC to CTO to founder, hiring the first engineers, knowing when to stop coding and when to refuse to stop coding.
• Startups — founding-CTO economics, technical due diligence, what investors actually look at, and the gap between “MVP” and “first dollar of ARR.”

Posts will be short and opinionated. I’d rather publish something incomplete than wait for it to be perfect — that’s the same bar I hold myself to when shipping product.