Building Tickstream: Real-Time Crypto Analytics with an AI Assist
A walkthrough of building a real-time streaming pipeline in Kotlin with Vert.x, InfluxDB 3, and a local LLM
I’m a backend dev based in Toronto, mostly working with Kotlin, Java, and PHP. These days I’m at Betr building live betting systems that need to handle a lot of data very fast.
It took 3 master’s degrees and a few years in sales to get here, but engineering is where I’m supposed to be. I genuinely love this craft — the problem solving, the performance tuning, the elegance of a system that just works. The winding road wasn’t wasted though; time spent in sales left me with something most devs don’t have: a feel for what actually matters to the person on the other side.
Outside of work I read too many tech books, occasionally write here, and play beach volleyball.
AI Tug of War: Everyone’s Shipping. Nobody’s Building.
Every role now uses AI to offload the hard parts. The result: more noise, worse quality, and a generation of engineers that didn’t actually learn.
Exploring APT
As a software developer, I like to really understand the tools I use every day to feel more in control and aware. I’ve been using APT for a long time to handle updates, dependencies, and installations on my Debian-based systems, but I’ve never looked into how it actually works. Learning about things like how it uses GPG keys to check repositories or manages software sources could come in handy for tasks like setting up Docker containers or solving issues with software updates.