Hi, I'm Nino.

Self-taught software developer from the Netherlands. I build back-end systems, quantitative trading algorithms, and the occasional Mac app. This site is where I write about the things I learn along the way.

What I'm up to

  • Lead developer at WorkWear4All and proud owner of Bitvested B.V.
  • Shipping Hourly — a lightweight time-tracking app for macOS.
  • Maintaining open-source libraries that have racked up 100K+ combined downloads.

Projects

  • Hourly · 2026 — A lightweight time-tracking app for macOS.
  • ta · 2020 — Open-source technical-analysis library for JavaScript, Python, and Go.
  • Bitvested · 2018 — A company I started in 2018 — my way into quantitative trading research.

Featured

An agent built around not calling the LLM Featured

Most agent frameworks default to call the model again. This post is about a personal agent built around the opposite default — do we actually need to call the model this time? — and the four pieces (main loop, scheduler, provider layer, setup flow) that fall out of taking that question seriously. The project is currently shelved; the parts that survive into the next iteration are the scheduler, the preprocessor pattern, and the provider abstraction.

Building an autoresearch lab I can actually watch Featured

For the past six weeks a machine I built has been doing part of my quant research for me. It proposes a hypothesis, writes the strategy itself, backtests it across twelve out-of-sample windows, and tells me which ideas are dead. It has run around 700 experiments and nothing has survived holdout. That reads like a verdict on autoresearch and it is not one, it is a verdict on my harness.

Latest writing

Spec files for agents deserve an editor that renders

A new agentic project of mine starts with a corpus of markdown: one document for what the project has to do, subfolders for the modules and systems inside it. Those files are what an agent reads per task, which makes them closer to a program than an essay. I forked a markdown editor so I could see their structure while writing them, and it renders the raw HTML the engine used to print as tags.

Spec-driven development is getting slow

Full spec-and-review ceremony on every task slowed the build to a crawl, so I forked superpowers into two speed lanes. The audit put a number on it: 27 subagent runs for 11 tasks, one fix loop eating 22 percent of them. Upstream shipped its own router a day after my routing change, so the problem was real.

ta v2.0.0: three libraries on one audited spec

ta v2.0.0 ships ta.js, ta.py, and ta.go on the same major version, with the same indicator set audited end-to-end against textbook formulas and a comparative benchmark in each language. Pure-JS ta.js wins 66 of 67 cross-library cases at 100k bars; pure-Go ta.go wins or ties everything in its field. The Python story is more complicated, and the post is honest about why.

Two weeks of agentic coding into a paywalled SaaS category

Hourly went live on the Mac App Store today, alongside the direct download from this site. It is free, local, no account, no paywall behind any feature. I built it in roughly two weeks with agentic coding tools as the cheapest empirical test I could run on whether agentic coding has actually started to break a paywalled SaaS category.

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