About me
Nischal Khanal
Software Engineer exploring systems, market infrastructure, and performance engineering
I'm a software engineer currently exploring the systems that sit beneath modern software and financial markets. A lot of my curiosity comes from questions that don't have quick answers. Why do some systems continue operating under pressure while others fail? Why can a few milliseconds matter in one environment and be completely irrelevant in another? How do exchanges process enormous volumes of information while continuously matching buyers and sellers? Those questions gradually pulled me beyond application development into networking, operating systems, distributed systems, market microstructure, and exchange architecture. Right now, most of my time is spent building projects, reading technical material, and studying how real systems behave when they encounter bottlenecks, scale, failures, and competing constraints. I'm particularly interested in the relationship between infrastructure, information flow, and decision-making in modern markets.
What I Aim to be
Understanding Systems
- How machines communicate across networks.
- How operating systems manage resources and workloads.
- How distributed systems behave under scale, failure, and load.
- How bottlenecks emerge and how they can be measured.
Understanding Performance
- Where latency originates inside a system.
- The tradeoffs between throughput, reliability, and speed.
- How hardware, software, and network decisions affect outcomes.
- Why performance optimization is often about removing constraints rather than adding complexity.
Understanding Markets
- How exchanges process and match orders.
- How market data is generated and distributed.
- How liquidity, spreads, and execution influence trading outcomes.
- How infrastructure creates advantages in competitive environments.
Building Technical Depth
- Developing strong foundations in C++, Python, Linux, and networking.
- Building projects that move beyond tutorials and expose real engineering challenges.
- Learning through experimentation, measurement, debugging, and iteration.
- Understanding systems from implementation details to architectural decisions.
Becoming a Better Engineer
- Thinking in systems rather than isolated technologies.
- Approaching problems with curiosity instead of assumptions.
- Becoming comfortable with ambiguity and difficult problems.
- Building the habit of continuous learning and independent exploration.