52 Weeks to HFT Engineer

A public learning roadmap documenting the journey from frontend engineering to production-grade HFT infrastructure over 52 weeks. The project is divided into four phases: Phase 1 — Foundation (Weeks 1-12): Building a matching engine from scratch. Order books, lock-free queues, memory-mapped I/O, and the fundamentals of exchange architecture. Phase 2 — Production (Weeks 13-24): Making it real with HTTP REST APIs, WebSocket streaming, rate limiting, authentication, graceful degradation, and operational tooling. Phase 3 — Performance (Weeks 25-40): Going fast with binary TCP protocols, SIMD optimizations, kernel bypass concepts, io_uring async I/O, and the techniques that separate toy projects from production HFT systems. Phase 4 — Mastery (Weeks 41-52): The complete picture. Trading strategy integration, risk management, backtesting, deployment, monitoring, and production readiness. Every week is documented publicly — code, decisions, mistakes, and learnings.