First principles from the oil pits

Imagine standing in a crude oil pit: noise, gestures, fragments of information being yelled across the ring. It looks chaotic, but it is not arbitrary. Underneath is a simple structure: who trades with whom, in what size, and at what priority.

Layers of reality

At the core you have physical constraints: barrels move on ships, not in nanoseconds. On top of that you have financial abstractions: futures, options, structured products.

When we build software around markets, we often invert this and start from the abstractions. Frameworks, services, orchestration. The first-principles path goes the other way:

while (orders_incoming) {
  normalize();
  prioritize();
  match();
  record();
}

Why this matters for systems design

If you align your architecture with the real stack of the market (physical → microstructure → products → UI), you get:

• fewer accidental layers
• clearer failure modes
• a UI that reflects actual constraints, not just chart widgets

That is why this blog is written in plain HTML. It is not nostalgia. It is a reminder: you can always choose the simpler, more honest layer to build on.