Engineering field notes by Pedro Mello

Ideas built from real systems.

Deep dives, practical guides and research shaped by the systems I design, ship and debug.

Building ManifoldSoftware EngineeringFinTech & DeFiAI & Applied Research

Featured · Building ManifoldAugust 24, 2026

Why Every Manifold Sale Must Add Up to Zero

How Manifold uses a zero-sum, append-only ledger to split marketplace payments, reject accounting errors, handle reversals and isolate currencies.

7 essays, tutorials and technical studies.

Building ManifoldMay 8, 20267 min read

Run reliable S3 integration tests locally with MinIO, Docker and the AWS SDK — without cloud credentials, fragile mocks or infrastructure costs.

Building ManifoldMar 4, 20265 min read

A practical CI architecture for scalable Next.js projects using linting, formatting, commit checks and single-command integration tests.

Software EngineeringDec 31, 20253 min read

Diagnose and fix Docker DNS resolution failures caused by systemd-resolved on Ubuntu, Debian and other Linux distributions.

Software EngineeringJun 30, 20253 min read

Back up MongoDB on a DigitalOcean Droplet with mongodump, compress the result and transfer it safely to your local machine.

FinTech & DeFiMay 29, 202510 min read

A technical study of DeFi liquidity models, private credit markets, lending protocols and the risks involved in connecting them.

AI & Applied ResearchJan 8, 20253 min read

Understand prediction, classification and linear regression through a concise house-pricing example that introduces a foundational AI method.