galoy-personal-notes/log.md

# Log

## 2025-07-23


### Chat with Andrew

- Wallet of satoshi had better timing that Blink
Rhode Island, between Boston and NY
15 years in Consulting for big companies
10 years in San Diego
2019-2020 orange pilled
4 years in Galoy

Bitcoin is a life raft for banks

Regulated vs pirate

"Whatever needs to be done"
- Marketing, Sales, CM,
- Right now: Go to market
Spoke with 20 banks in the last 6 months

slow and steady, not fiat attitude

content marketing: blink blog was really good

### Chat with Nicolas

- I think I'm up to date with company goals, but maybe you want to give me your view?
- Manage audit vs data work

"One year ago we decide to throw all our eggs in one basket"
"Maybe in three months we have nothing to do"

Currently El Salvador only has a commercial banking law, doesn't have any investment banking law. Keeps getting pushed backed because of compliance with IMF. Law might be approved any time.

Teenage Sex

Opportunities to do something in the US with the team that started Silvergate

Before it was Fulgur and Tether, but Tether dropped out earlier this year.

- IBEX fun story

- I'm surprised by the length of the tenures

- About the 1 or 2 engineers per quarter comment you made, how come?

Vitaly, major shareholder of Bitfinex, 10K, 50K BTC
John Carlo, guy owning Tether

Get in the calls with Vicky ASAP

I like the Wild West, Godfather 2 in Cuba feeling of this project

### ACE

- We pick the "make me a new snapshot row everytime a entity state rollup happens" way.
- Docker Hub rate limiting: we decide to just leave the docker hub image for now and see if the rate limiting problem comes back or not


### Chat with Sebastien

- Japan since 5 years ago. 5 years in washington before.
- 8yo daughter that climbs, also has a 16yo daughter
- 4 years in Galoy
- Designed to Stablesats
- Equity derivatives at Lehman brothers and Morgan Stanley


Jose got kidnapped by language skills

### Ongoing 

10/365, daily interest 
Sandipan working on app-driven report generation 

Challenges
- Loosely, conversation driven requirements.
- Lack of testing approach to tell if things are right or not
- Trouble keeping up with all the breaking changes of the backend 
- Snowflake? Postgres? Anything else?


### Chat with Jiri

- Joined in April '25
- Backend, using Rust for the first time
- Used to work with Scala
- In Taiwan
- From Czech Republic
- Flying license

### Chat with Justin

- Rollup drama update

- Getting Bigquery set up


## 2025-07-22

### Daily call

- Meeting the team
- Soaking in info
    - Review Looms from the team
    - Reading through data requirements and dbt artifacts
        - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1r2HEl4_VYJh4spajmiDz_A1DXAnfshPg/edit?gid=1297332161#gid=1297332161
        - https://www.bcr.gob.sv/
        - https://norms-llm-dylanwilson32.replit.app/
        - https://github.com/GaloyMoney/lana-bank/tree/main/meltano/transform/models/outputs/el-salvador-ssf
- Doing
    - Working out where to change in Terraform to get BigQuery env
    - Just managed to set up local env
        - Had some issues with nix
    - Filling in onboarding details



Onboarding stuff
    - I've started and merged this PR to onboarding (on-call): https://github.com/GaloyMoney/onboarding/pull/18
    - Started this one, still pending review (code-review): https://github.com/GaloyMoney/onboarding/pull/17

### Chat with Sebastien

From Sebastien

    If you haven't figured this out yet, the data flows like this:
    staging (stg_* files) -> intermediate (int_* files) -> output (misc. but often report_* files)
    Under staging, the 'rollups' folder hosts the "rolled up" source data from the backend, raw.
    Under intermediate, the 'rollups' folder hosts the expanded & type casted version of the above raw data and should be the source of all(most?) our transformations
    The backend is architecture'd to stream events for most "objects"/"entity" 
    (as concisely explained here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg6aF5PP4Tc)
    and so the rollups are the snapshots of the state of those "objects"/"entity" as a one per row table (chronological reduce / event summarization) mentioned in the video around 4:20.
    The reduce process are backend side, done as triggers for now on "objects"/"entity" events table in PG and visible a sql migrations under lana/app/migrations/<date>_*_events_rollup.sqlI think you should be familiar with that process given the interview take home, but that's what we adopted for now and it's all automated...
    so if a field name changes in the backend for example, and the pipeline falls out of sync it breaks and we can address it, rather than silently failing.
    So anyways all the concepts of the bank and data we might be interested in analyzing, reporting, etc. are implicitly documented with the above 3 set of rollup sql.
    The credit facility object is probably the most interesting and easy to start with as it is a vanilla bank loan or dumbed down line of credit.

### Coffee with Kartik

- Where are you based?
    - Bangalore, been there for two years
- How long you've been around?
    - 5 years, started out when it was just Nicolas and him for engineering?
- What's your main focus?
    - Deployment and infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines
    - We should probably talk for unit testing stuff
- What were you doing before Galoy?
    - Uni
- Quite a rollercoaster, right?

### Coffee with Arvin

- Where are you based?
    - Trinidad
- How long you've been around?
    - July'21
- What's your main focus?
    - Mostly backend stuff
- What were you doing before Galoy?

Into Bitcoin for quite while. Lots of FOSS.
Big El Salvador focus back in the day.
Team was more operational back with Blink.
Split Blink, people could choose.

## 2025-07-21

### Call with Justin

About rotation:
- Rotation is organized in weekly pairs of devs. Each dev takes a 12 hour shift.
- The oncall dev is responsible for:
    - Being the first responder to any alerts that happen in production.
    - Triaging the alerts to judge the severity and whether end-users are being affected or not.
    - Either tackling the issue themselves or gathering the colleagues with the required knowledge whenever possible.

### Daily Call

There's a Kanban in Volcano WIP. Kind of Adhoc.