Always Risk On
IIndex

Bets, builds and post-mortems, with the numbers left in.

One email a month, and each one ends with something you can check.

180 paths, seeded 20261008
Same fan for everyone today

The tape

Short notes, each with a number. The board moves one line every 6.5 seconds with risk off and every 2.2 with it on.

  • The home page can load 66.7 KB of gzipped JavaScript on the production build, GSAP and its lazy chunks included, against a budget of 90 KB, and the budgets gate fails any page that goes over.
  • Archived the foundation's rulings and ledger at 165 commits, and 93 of them are fixes.
  • The foundation's last fix left 2,053 unit tests passing, counted by vitest on a clean checkout of that commit, and not one real page existed yet.
  • The disclosure scan's last fix folds Armenian and Cherokee look-alike letters before matching, so each of its 25 terms still hits when someone spells it with the wrong alphabet.
  • The last of the 63 foundation tasks closed, the one that renders diagrams to PNG for the feed and the markdown twins, and a final review of the whole run came next.
  • 27 September closed on 95 commits across a 23.8 hour span, the busiest day of the build so far, and that span is commit times, not hours at a desk.
London 14 notes on rotation
Every note on the tape

Write-ups

Each one ends with a repo, a dataset or a number you can check. The line beside each title is drawn from it, and its shape comes from the kind of work.

  1. 30.09.20264 minBuildBuild log

    Building alwaysriskon.com: a foundation of gates before a single page

    What the first build of this site shipped, broke and cost. Ends with the live site and its ledger.

    Foundation commits165
  2. 30.09.20264 minOpsCase

    Why Always Risk On sends its email through Buttondown behind an adapter

    Two providers, one contract, and the call for launch. Ends with the call and what it leaves open.

    Adapters2
  3. 30.09.20264 minResearchTeardown

    What 90 KB of JavaScript buys on the Always Risk On home page

    The home page's script budget, taken apart module by module. Ends with a way to check it in your browser.

    Home page JS66.7 KB
  4. 30.09.20262 minResearchField note

    The Always Risk On fan draws the same 180 price paths for everyone each London day

    One number about the chart behind the wordmark. Ends with a seed you can check in the footer.

    Paths180
  5. 30.09.20265 minResearchTeardown

    How the disclosure gate on this site keeps a live trading edge silent

    Four layers, one keyword list, and what a scan cannot prove. Ends with the four layers, stated.

    Scan terms25
Every write-up

Positions

Every project is a position, with when it opened, how far it got, what it cost and what it taught. The sized view scales each one by its hours and fills it to its progress.

  1. Open

    The email list

    Email is how readers are kept, so the list gets its own position, and it has no numbers worth printing until people are on it.

    Ops28.09.2026to now0 h0%0 h£0
  2. Open

    Live tape backend

    A service that pushes tape notes to the board as they happen, and until it exists the board rotates the notes kept in the repo.

    Build26.09.2026to now0 h0%0 h£0
  3. Open

    Search and citation tracking

    Checks whether search engines and AI assistants find and cite these pages, and it is parked until there are enough posts to be worth checking.

    Research26.09.2026to now0 h0%0 h£0
  4. Open

    Voice note to write-up

    Will turn a voice note into a write-up pull request, and the disclosure and no-faces boxes on it will still be ticked by me, not by an agent.

    Build26.09.2026to now0 h0%0 h£0
  5. Closed

    Three design drafts

    Draft C won because it looked like what was asked for, a blend between a trading screen and a business dashboard.

    Research26.09.2026to 26.09.20260 h100%0 h£0
  6. Closed

    Site foundation

    93 of the 165 commits were fixes, so the first version of each part was a draft and the review rounds did the rest.

    Build26.09.2026to 28.09.202649 h100%49 h£0

Open positions show only the hours and the money spent. Everything else waits for the post-mortem, once a position is closed or dead.

Every position

Now

Updated 28 Sept 2026.

Sam builds small tools and places small bets, then writes up what each one cost and what it taught him. Every number here can be checked.

XYouTubeLinkedIn

28.09.2026

The foundation is done, 165 commits of parts and gates and no real pages yet, so the pages are next.

26.09.2026

Picked draft C, the floor, out of three, and wrote the spec the rest of the site gets built from.

The whole now log