On the lucidity of working in tech.
Essays by Domenico Giordano. Twenty years across a tier-1 consulting firm and in-house Italian banking. In parallel, a solo founder of tech products. Writing without demonising or sweetening.
- 01
The trust you receive is a debt
When someone trusts you before the proof, the risk passes from their hands to yours. On the weight of trust received, and the doubt that never closes. Second of two pieces on trust.
A · Management7 min read - 02
Trust doesn't arrive with you
When you join a new team, you assume your good faith arrives before you do. It doesn't. On building trust in a place that decided, before it met you, that you would fail, and why only a price you pay yourself moves anyone who has been burned before.
A · Management5 min read - 03
My homelab is not for reliability
My homelab has worse uptime than the €17 server that runs my actual product. I keep it anyway, because reliability was never the point. It is the zero-stakes place where I rehearse the operational disciplines that matter where it counts.
C · Cloud13 min read - 04
Auditing my own AI workflow
I had a seventeen-turn conversation with another instance of Claude about how I use Claude Code. The valuation it gave me was wrong in both directions: inflated where it guessed, deflated where I had quietly underdescribed what I had built. The interesting result was not the score. It was the bias on both sides.
D · AI17 min read - 05
The shadow trader
A backtest said my arbitrage strategy was profitable. A shadow trader running inside the production process, against the same order book, said it was off by 65 basis points. The architectural difference between the two was the part the backtest ignored. That part decided the outcome.
B · Architecture12 min read