The Twenty Months We Cannot Show You

This series has been written out of our own git history. We have used it to date a pivot, to reconstruct a night nobody wrote up, and to prove that our origin story was missing six years.

So it is only fair to publish what the history does not contain.

Between July 2021 and February 2023 — twenty months — every repository we hold contains a total of three commits. All three fall on a single day. The trading system was live that entire time.

What came immediately before the silence

The months leading up to it were the busiest in the archive.

Starting in late 2020 we rebuilt the trading stack as infrastructure-as-code: templates, deployment pipelines, the functions split apart and declared rather than hand-placed. And alongside it, something we had never built before — user accounts. Authentication. Identity pools. The machinery you only need if other people are going to log in.

The volume tells the story on its own: ten commits that December, then fifty-nine, then forty-eight, then one hundred and eighteen in a single month. In May 2021 the entry that closes that effort reads, in capitals, WORKING SECURE … AUTH — the tone of someone who has been fighting something for a while and has just won.

Thirty-nine more commits in June. Then nothing.

We built the front door of a product and never opened it.

The good

The trading did not stop. That is not nothing. Through all twenty months the system kept running, kept taking positions, and kept doing the thing the business existed to do. Whatever else was true, the money-handling part stayed up.

And the decision to stop building the product was probably right. A multi-user platform is a different company from a proprietary trading system — support, compliance, billing, someone else's losses. Walking away from that in 2021 is defensible, and given what the crypto market did next, it may have been the best decision in the archive.

The bad

Nobody wrote down that we had stopped.

There is no final commit saying "parking this", no note explaining the change of direction, no decision record. The last entries are five in one day working on a strength analyzer, and one from a week earlier that reads disable analyzer schedule till we build it... — trailing dots included. A thing deferred until later, and later never came.

Ten months on, one solitary commit appears — a single word, an exclamation mark, unrelated to any of it. Then the repository is silent forever.

Read cold, that is what abandonment looks like in a version-control system: not a decision, an absence.

The ugly

A live system that moves money ran for twenty months with essentially no version-controlled history.

We want to be precise about that claim, because the honest version is narrower than the dramatic one. What we can prove is that the record is missing, not that the code was. Software was plainly being changed in that period — the system did not stand still for twenty months — and some of it may well have lived on servers, edited in place, outside anything we can now inspect. We cannot show you what happened, and we also cannot tell you exactly what we lost. Both of those are consequences of the same gap.

What that costs is not sentimental. It is the ability to answer questions like when did this behaviour start, why is this parameter set to that, and what were we thinking — the questions that consume most of an engineer's first months on any system, and the ones we have spent this month answering by reading commit messages from 2020 because there was nothing closer.

And it corrects the first answer we gave ourselves. When we went looking for this history, the question asked internally was whether the old code had been backed up at all. The answer came back yes — and for the cloud repositories that is true, all twenty-two of them, complete and readable. It is not true as a general statement, and we should not have left it there. A backup covers what was committed. It cannot cover a period when very little was, and the gap is invisible precisely because everything that does exist is intact.

What we do now

Everything runs from version control, and the record is treated as part of the system rather than a by-product of it. Decisions get written where the work happens. Incidents get published, including this one.

The rule we would give anyone running a small technical operation: your history is a real asset, and it degrades silently. Nobody notices the month they stopped committing. You notice two years later, when you need to know why something is the way it is and the only honest answer is that nobody can remember and nobody wrote it down.

We are writing this one down.

RoboTrader trades CME micro futures. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor. Past performance is not indicative of future results.