I'm Ryan. I build and operate an autonomous futures trading system in Elixir — a single application running on a DigitalOcean droplet, trading real capital, unattended.
Serious Alchemy is where I write about the engineering that makes that work. Supervision trees, broker integrations, fault recovery, real-time data feeds, order execution — the problems that only surface when a system is live and managing money with nobody watching.
This isn't a tutorial site. There are no toy examples. Every post comes from production code that's running right now.
How the posts are made
I write these posts with AI assistance. The code is real, the architecture is real, the production experience is real — but the prose is drafted collaboratively with Claude. I supply the system knowledge, the code, and the editorial direction. AI handles the scaffolding and helps me ship writing alongside everything else.
I'm upfront about this because I think it matters. The value here is the experience and the engineering, not the writing process. If a post says the system reconciles with the broker every 30 seconds, it's because I built that and it's been running for months — not because a language model hallucinated it.
What you get
Free posts cover the architecture of design decisions — enough to understand how the system works and why it's built the way it is.
Paid posts go deeper: full implementations, production code, and the details that only matter if you're building something similar.
Get in touch
If you have questions or want to talk shop, reach out at ryan@seriousalchemy.com