Long-form posts on the projects I work on — mostly machine learning, data engineering, and the tooling around them. Writeups of what I built, what broke, and what I'd do differently.

Pinned

Trading Bot Journey
Apr 29, 2026

A year building a Transformer + Mixture-of-Experts model for crypto microstructure trading on Bybit. The architecture, the training pipeline, the diagnostic experiments that ruled out the strategy class, and what I came away with.

A Working Toolkit for Ambiguous, Data-Heavy Problems
Apr 29, 2026

The transferable methodology from a year of ML trading work: feasibility math, normalization and clipping, walk-forward validation, Monte Carlo, training/serving parity, signal filtering, kill-switches, and systematic rejection.

How This Site Works
Mar 20, 2026

Vue SSG, Docker multi-stage builds, GitHub Actions, and a DigitalOcean droplet — the full stack behind nicholsslayton.com.

Heart Rate Delta Live Tables Pipeline
Oct 20, 2022

A multi-hop ETL pipeline built with Databricks Delta Live Tables — bronze/silver/gold layers for Oura Ring heart rate data.

Databricks Workspace Setup
Oct 19, 2022

Standing up a Databricks workspace on Azure with ADLS Gen2, service principal auth, and Unity Catalog — from scratch.