Before it all started, back in the early 2010s, I read about High Frequency Trading, and it sounded super interesting. I wanted to understand how it worked. Without knowing anything about it, I thought I could simply get a Xilinx dev board and start using Verilog to build a hardware appliance for fast trades. Little did I know that a cheap dev board with limited logic gates wasn’t even enough to fit an Ethernet IP, let alone the challenges of using Verilog. I soon realized that it's probably more suited for electrical engineers (EEs) than software engineers (SWEs).