Skip to main content

From London Hackathon to Open-Source Baseline

Published: May 2023

TraderX did not start as a perfectly planned greenfield open-source project. The early shape came from practical prototyping work, including hackathon-style collaboration in London at BMO, where the goal was to turn an internal concept into a learning-oriented open-source base.

By May 2023, the repository began to show real structure:

  • Initial checkin landed core service wiring (#13).
  • Java build and corporate build support were improved (#15).
  • Both Angular and React front-end variants were added (#17, #19).
  • Trade ticket and feed workflow behavior were refined (#20, #21).
  • Messaging and "corp-friendly" structure were reworked (#22).

This period set a lasting theme for TraderX: keep the stack understandable, runnable, and polyglot enough to teach integration concerns without requiring enterprise-scale setup on day one.

Even at this early stage, the long-term question was already visible: how do we preserve simplicity as the project grows?

That question eventually shaped almost every architectural decision that followed.