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An algorithmic trading platform doesn't operate in isolation it responds to the changing conditions of the financial markets. One of the biggest factors affecting automated trading performance is the market session. Liquidity, volatility, trading volume, and price movements can vary significantly throughout the trading day, influencing how an algorithmic trading platform executes trades. Understanding how different market sessions impact automated trading can help traders choose the right strategies, manage risk more effectively, and improve overall trading performance. What Are Market Sessions? A market session refers to a specific period during which a stock exchange is open for trading. In India, the National Stock Exchange (NSE) and Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) follow a structured trading schedule that includes the pre-open session, regular trading hours, and post-closing session. Each session has unique market characteristics, making it important for traders to understand how their automated strategies may behave during these periods. Why Market Sessions Matter in Algorithmic Trading An algorithmic trading platform follows predefined rules, but the market environment changes throughout the day. A strategy that performs well during high-volume periods may struggle when trading activity is low. Market sessions influence several key factors, including: Trading volume Market liquidity Price volatility Bid-ask spreads Order execution quality Recognizing these differences allows traders to build strategies that are better suited to specific market conditions. Pre-Open Session The pre-open session is used to determine the opening price of securities before regular trading begins. During this period: Orders are collected but not executed immediately. Prices may fluctuate as the market discovers the opening level. Liquidity can be limited. Large overnight news events may influence price movements. Most intraday automated strategies are designed to become active only afte

One thing Microsoft is not good at is naming things, and sadly it's happened again. But let's go back to the beginning: what are Skills? Skills are targeted prompts/context that are modular, so they are not always included in the LLM session. They are Markdown files with selected metadata in YAML, all in a file normally named skill.md (the parent folder and YAML metadata identify it). They were created by Anthropic (Claude) and were designed for both the user to add in a prompt ( /Skill ), or for the LLM to decide. Similar to Skills are Plug-ins. These can (and often do) include skill.md files, but can also have scripts, MCP servers, and other tools. So back to Microsoft naming things badly. Copilot Studio (Azure Bot Framework version) had skills, but they were not skills. The new Copilot Studio has Skills, but they are not Skills, they are actually Plug-ins. Plug-ins include Skills, so why does it matter? Well, it doesn't really, but I like to moan, and it means sometimes cool functionality can be left on the table because we presume Microsoft names things accurately. Anyway I digress (I like to do that), now we understand what Skills/Plug-ins are I wanted to dive into them within Copilot Studio and cover: Why Are They Cool Building Powerful Skills Adding Scripts/Templates Using Skills 1. Why Are They Cool I often go on about skills being cool, but why? There are a few reasons. Context Management Before skills, the standard approach was to give the LLM everything and let it figure out what it needed. The problem with this is twofold. First, more context equals more tokens, which equals more cost. Second—and more importantly—too much unrelated context can have a detrimental impact on the LLM response. LLMs work by using input tokens to predict the next token, so polluted input tokens can make the LLM predict the wrong next token (this is a huge simplification, but you get what I mean). Transferable As skills are simple Markdown files, they can easily be transferred

If you run more than a handful of OpenTelemetry Collectors, you already know the pain: a config change means SSHing into boxes, redeploying DaemonSets, or babysitting a Git pipeline per cluster, and you never quite trust that every agent is running the config you think it is. OpAMP fixes exactly that. It is a protocol that lets a central server push configuration to a fleet of Collectors, watch their health, and roll changes out in stages, without you touching each host. This post walks through how OpAMP works, the two ways a Collector can speak it, and the config you need to wire one up. The problem OpAMP solves A single Collector is easy. A hundred of them, spread across clusters, VMs, and edge nodes, is a fleet-management problem that has nothing to do with telemetry itself. Every observability team eventually builds some version of the same thing: a way to ship a new pipeline config, confirm it actually applied, and back it out when a processor starts dropping spans. Without a management protocol you end up gluing that together from ConfigMaps, Ansible runs, and dashboards that only tell you an agent is alive, not what config it is actually running. Config drift creeps in. One node keeps an old sampling rate for months because its rollout quietly failed and nobody noticed. OpAMP, the Open Agent Management Protocol, is the OpenTelemetry answer to this. Splunk donated it to the project in 2022, and it has since become the standard control channel for the Collector. It is worth pairing with a clear-eyed view of what a Collector actually is versus lighter agents; the OpenTelemetry Collector vs Grafana Alloy comparison covers that trade-off if you are still choosing a data plane. What OpAMP actually is OpAMP is a client/server network protocol for remote management of large fleets of data-collection agents. It is transport-flexible: agents connect to the server over either plain HTTP or a WebSocket, and the WebSocket path gives you a persistent bidirectional channel

Herodotus wrote of a bird that lived five hundred years in Arabia, and when its life came to an end, it did not wait to be surprised by death. It built its own nest of cinnamon and myrrh, set the nest and itself alight, and let a new bird rise from what the fire left behind. The Hestia argued for tending a fire that must never go out. That’s true, and it isn’t the whole truth. Teams end. People leave. Companies get acquired, reorganized, shut down, and five years from now some part of this whole model will probably look as dated as the practices it was written to replace. No amount of tending prevents that. Pretending otherwise is its own kind of Alexandria , a slow decline dressed up as continuity, right up until the fire goes out anyway and nobody chose the moment. The bird in Herodotus doesn’t get caught by surprise. It builds the pyre itself. Chooses the moment, gathers what matters, and burns deliberately, trusting that what rises afterward carries the shape of what came before, not because the fire preserved the old bird whole, but because starting over was never the same thing as starting from nothing. That’s the part tending alone can’t promise. A team that’s about to be split up can hand its shared model to whoever inherits the work on purpose, the way a rep in the Boule carries a decision back instead of leaving it to travel however it happens to travel. A team about to lose its most experienced person can spend the weeks before that departure making sure the framing, not just the conclusions, made it into someone else’s head, the way the Mimesis argued a junior actually learns. None of that stops the ending. It decides what the ending leaves behind. This series doesn’t get to end with a fire that never goes out. Nothing does. It gets to end with the only thing actually inside anyone’s control. Build the pyre on purpose. Choose what goes into the fire. References The Myth of the Phoenix: Rebirth and Renewal : Greek Mythology, on Herodotus’s original accoun

Google Cloud has published a new blueprint setting out how organisations should secure artificial intelligence workloads running on Google Kubernetes Engine, arguing that the shift from prototype to production has outpaced traditional security models. The document sets out a three layer approach covering infrastructure, model integrity and application security. By Matt Saunders

Max Korbacher explains why successful internal development platforms cannot be built on tech alone. He discusses the pitfalls of infrastructure-first thinking, the importance of a clear product mindset, and how to measure real value using DevEx and SPACE metrics. Learn how to align your team, manage tech debt, and foster a thriving community to ensure lasting platform adoption. By Max Körbächer

Google's AlphaEvolve reached general availability on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, turning the DeepMind research project into an evolutionary code optimization service. Evaluators run client-side so code never leaves the customer's infrastructure. Klarna doubled ML training throughput; practitioners note it only works where a measurable evaluation function exists. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Before a young Athenian took his full place in the city, he spent two years in the ephebeia. Training happened in the gymnasion, organized by tribe, the same tribes that would later send him to represent them in the Boule itself. Nobody handed him full standing first and hoped the judgment would follow. This should have been post seven. It’s showing up as sixteen because the gap only became visible once the room was real enough to test against. The Agora described what a Spec Session does. It never asked whether everyone walking into that room shares an accurate picture of what the agent can actually do. Most rooms don’t. Someone watched a demo and thinks the agent can do anything. Someone else got burned by a bad output three weeks ago and doesn’t trust it with anything real. Nobody’s intuition has been tested against the same tasks, and the spec that comes out of that room ends up too ambitious or too conservative depending on whose untested belief happened to speak first. That gap has a name in Athens. The gymnasion existed because nobody was handed a place in the city first and expected to develop judgment on the job. The ephebeia ran two years, training built around a specific fact. Physical readiness and civic judgment weren’t taught in separate places. They happened in the same space, under the same supervisors, organized by the same tribal groupings that would later structure how the city actually governed itself. The same word, gymnasion, ended up naming both the training ground for eighteen-year-olds and the buildings where Plato and Aristotle did their most serious thinking. Academy and Lyceum were gymnasia first. Nobody separated the trial from the reflection. The trial was how the reflection got earned. That’s the part worth taking seriously. Testing a tool and understanding a tool were never two different activities. The testing is how the understanding gets built. A team that reads documentation about what an agent can do has a description. A team tha

Metron was the Greek word for a measure: the standard you judge a thing against. It gives us metric, and metronome. Pick the wrong metron and everything you count against it comes out wrong, no matter how carefully you count. Ask most teams how they know AI adoption is working, and the answer is some version of: we’re shipping more. More PRs, more tickets closed, more velocity on the board. None of those numbers were ever measuring what people thought they were measuring. They were proxies, and bad ones, for whether the team was creating value. AI didn’t break that. It just made the proxies lie louder. An agent can produce PRs faster than any team can review them. It can close tickets all day. None of that tells you whether the thing built was worth building, or whether it fixed the actual problem, or whether anyone downstream is better off. Burning tokens isn’t the same thing as creating value. It just looks the same on a dashboard built to reward the first thing. The same DORA numbers I pointed at earlier are blunt about it: individual output climbs while delivery throughput and stability drop. Same bottleneck, counted at the wrong end . This is Theory of Constraints in one sentence: speeding up a step that wasn’t the bottleneck doesn’t speed up the system. It just piles more work in front of whatever the real bottleneck is. Implementation used to be the constraint. Now it isn’t. Review is. Coordination is. Making sure everyone agrees on what “done” even means is. Agents made the fast part faster and left the slow part exactly where it was, except now it’s buried under more output arriving to be reviewed by fewer people who understand any of it. Measuring individual speed after that shift is measuring the wrong clock. The team can be faster and worse off in the same quarter. The instinct, when this gets noticed, is to add another skill to the agent. Automate the review step too. Automate the coordination. Whatever’s slow, throw a capability at it. That doesn’t fix

Ruth Linehan explains how migrating high-performance caching services from Kotlin to Rust shattered internal preconceptions around delivery velocity and engineering overhead. She discusses the ergonomics of the Rust borrow checker, shares how compile-time safety shortens the developer feedback loop, and profiles how tools like Criterion and flamegraphs optimize concurrent code paths. By Ruth Linehan

DoorDash details the architecture behind Ask DoorDash, its AI-powered conversational shopping assistant, combining LLMs, specialized AI agents, MCP-based tooling, and an intelligence layer with persistent consumer memory and live backend data. Early results show up to 24% higher checkout conversion, 17% larger baskets, and improved intent accuracy using memory-backed sessions. By Leela Kumili

Davide de Paolis discusses the realities of rolling out cloud infrastructure compliance without fracturing developer relations. Drawing from a real-world platform team reboot at Sevdesk, he explains how to implement "minimum viable governance" on AWS, utilize event-driven Slack alerting to automate policy feedback, and shift from rigid enforcement to high-empathy, data-driven collaboration. By Davide de Paolis

Throughout my career I have had to work with quite a few platform teams, and I was part of two for a couple of years. Some were bad, some were good and some should not have existed at all. I want to tell you my user experience, what I have seen work and what not and what you should definitely avoid doing. Be The Multiplier This is the main goal of a platform team. As a team, it needs to be a multiplier. If the platform team supports 10 teams, then each work it commits should multiply by 10. If the team member builds a new feature, it should be helpful for all the other teams. Otherwise, the platform team is an addition, and in most cases it is then better to split the platform team and add them to all other teams, instead of being a separate team. Because the amount of communication needed is in most cases quadratic in relation to the number of teams. Reducing Cognitive Load The platform should take away cognitive load for all the teams it supports. By doing so, they will have more time to implement business requirements. Let's say a platform team provides Gitlab runners or Azure Agents where people can run their CI/CD code on. They should not need to know how the runners are scaled, or how the agents are updated. This takes away the need for that skill set in all the teams. Build a Community A platform team has a unique position. It is building something that all other developers probably can build as well. Some could do it even better than the platform team itself. For some platform teams, their ego sometimes comes in to play or just straight up refuses their help because they are not the team. But it is not the job of the platform team to build a product, but a platform where everyone can thrive and/or build on. So onboard the community on the platform! The Law of Diffusion applies to almost all companies. You will have the innovators that want to build it themselves and the early adopters that will voice their opinion, but will not build it themselves. Those two

A platform is a collaboration system: platform teams depend on application teams, and both need shared standards. Engineers trust a platform through its predictable behavior, not its features. Being an engineer is about problem-solving and being passionate about it. And being an engineer means sharing your passion for problem-solving. By Ben Linders

Google shipped AlloyDB AI functions GA with a proxy model architecture that trains a lightweight local model from LLM outputs, then runs queries at database speed without external calls. Smart batching delivers 2,400x throughput improvement. The proxy model reaches 100,000 rows per second in preview, but benchmark numbers apply only to ai.if in internal testing. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

AWS has outlined how ProGlove, an industrial-wearables manufacturer, was able to scale its SaaS platform to run more than one million AWS Lambda functions spread across thousands of dedicated customer accounts. By Matt Foster

Airbnb engineers detailed Sitar-agent, a Kubernetes sidecar for dynamic configuration delivery across tens of thousands of pods, processing updates several times per minute. The system was redesigned with Java, Amazon S3 snapshot bootstrapping, and a migration from Sparkey to SQLite to improve reliability, startup performance, and configuration availability at scale. By Leela Kumili

Tra performance, piattaforma e toolchain: i temi che contano davvero per chi costruisce frontend oggi. Il frontend nel 2026 è diventato una disciplina sempre più “di prodotto”: non basta far funzionare l’interfaccia, serve che sia veloce, stabile, accessibile e misurabile in produzione. E quando l’ecosistema Chrome parla di “connessione” tra developer e piattaforma, il messaggio utile per chi lavora sul web è semplice: capire dove investire tempo per ottenere impatto reale sugli utenti . Di seguito, una lettura pratica dei temi che continuano a emergere come prioritari per chi costruisce applicazioni e siti moderni. 1) Performance: meno benchmark, più realtà La performance non è più un esercizio di ottimizzazione a fine progetto. È un requisito continuo che va gestito con strumenti, metriche e processi. Cosa significa “misurabile” oggi Metriche di campo (real user monitoring) : le prestazioni che contano sono quelle che arrivano dai dispositivi reali, su reti reali. Metriche di laboratorio : restano utili per regressioni e CI, ma vanno interpretate come “segnali” e non come verità assolute. Implicazione pratica Imposta una pipeline dove: le metriche sintetiche bloccano regressioni evidenti (build/PR), le metriche reali guidano le priorità (release e backlog). 2) DevTools: dal debug al controllo qualità Gli strumenti di sviluppo non servono più solo a “trovare il bug”, ma a ridurre il rischio : regressioni di layout, memory leak, risorse inutili, dipendenze pesanti. Abitudini che fanno differenza Profilare prima di ottimizzare: CPU, rete e rendering hanno colli di bottiglia diversi. Isolare i cambiamenti: una variazione di bundling o di immagini può ribaltare il profilo prestazionale più di una micro-ottimizzazione in JS. 3) La piattaforma web continua a crescere (e chiede scelte più consapevoli) La Web Platform oggi offre API potenti, ma la parte difficile non è “usarle”: è scegliere quando usarle. Un criterio utile Se una feature riduce complessità (meno librerie,

When I wrote about shifting the engineering process left — spec sessions, autonomous agents, humans reviewing output rather than writing code — a question kept coming up. Where does the Product Owner fit in all of this? It’s the right question. And I think the answer is more interesting than “the PO disappears.” Let’s start with acceptance criteria. We invented them to bridge a gap. The team needed to know when something was done. The PO needed confidence that what got built matched the intent. Acceptance criteria were the contract between the two. But if the Spec Session is where intent gets defined — by the whole team, together, before the agent runs — that gap closes. What the team agreed on in the room is the definition of done. The spec is the acceptance criteria. You don’t need a separate validation step because the planning and the agreement happened at the same time. The tighter the loop, the less ceremony you need around it. There’s a caveat though. The spec is a necessary contract. It’s not a sufficient one. Simon Martinelli’s work on the AI Unified Process validates the spec-driven approach technically. But his model is about the artifact — requirements at the center, AI generating everything else from them. How the team actually builds shared understanding before the spec exists isn’t something it addresses. That’s not a criticism. It’s just a different question. A spec written after a real Spec Session — where the team worked through edge cases together, disagreed, got to resolution — is different from a spec written by one person and signed off asynchronously. Same artifact. Different quality of shared understanding. That distinction matters when the agent hits an edge case the spec didn’t anticipate. So what’s actually left for a dedicated PO? Two things. And they’re very different. The first is product thinking — challenging intent, representing user needs, asking why before the agent runs with something. That’s valuable. But it doesn’t require a ded

An astrolabe doesn’t map every star. It gives you a way to find your position relative to the ones that hold still. That’s the instrument I reach for when someone asks which AI tool they should be using. The honest answer is that the tools will be different in six months. The layers won’t. I spent a week trying to make sense of a handful of names that kept showing up in the same conversations. Tessl . Goose . Archestra . Kestra . Modelplane . RAG , MCP , half a dozen others orbiting nearby. Each one has its own pitch, its own funding round, its own reason it’s the thing you should adopt next. Taken together they read like noise. Taken apart, they sit on different floors of the same building. The agent loop again, the one I keep coming back to. Once you place each tool on a floor, the noise turns into a map. Tessl sits left of the loop , at the intent layer. Turn a spec into something an agent runs against directly. This is the one tool on the list that pushes back instead of going along with it. A well-formed spec is not the same thing as a team that agrees on what the spec means. The Agora produces the second thing as a byproduct of producing the first. Tessl produces the first and assumes the second follows. It doesn’t, automatically. That’s the whole argument. RAG and MCP are plumbing. Protocol, not position. They carry context into the loop and don’t take a side in any argument about who should be in the room when the spec gets written. They’re also the one floor with an actual standard. MCP, A2A , ACP , all under Linux Foundation governance now, joint working groups, cross-protocol commitments. Passing data between systems is a solved problem with decades of precedent behind it, so it standardized almost on contact. Nothing else on this floor plan has that. Governance, orchestration, the harness, the spec layer: every vendor is still building its own version and calling it the obvious one. The standard showed up first at the floor that mattered least to this ar