/ 2026.04.19 / seattle / indeedNikita Groshin. Principal Engineer at Indeed. Shipped CocCoc in Hanoi, Alexa Connect Kit at Amazon in Seattle, and Groupon across 26 countries. Writing essays on the things I actually build.
“More trades means more fee drag, more slippage, and more opportunities to be wrong. The edge, if it exists, needs to be large enough to survive the friction.”
— I Built 11 Trading Bots, Killed 9, and All I Got Was This $13 Loss“It is a machine trying to simulate a human trying to sound like a machine.”
— The Algorithmic Gaze: Why I Outsourced My Melancholy to a Server Farm in Northern Virginia“You aren't fighting the wall; you are walking right through it. Digital sovereignty isn't given; it's built.”
— The Ghost in the Machine: Setting Up a VLESS + Reality VPN for Perfect Stealth“You just describe the vibe in plain English (or excited kid-speak), and a swarm of AI agents plans, codes, debugs, tests, and polishes it all for you.”
— Roblox vibe coding“I was able to create this website in just one evening by utilizing APIs… it's difficult to predict how Google will react to hybrid content.”
— Generating websites content with AI
Recent essays
all writing →- ·Infrastructure·11 min
I Built 11 Trading Bots, Killed 9, and All I Got Was This $13 Loss
Eleven bots. $95 in starting capital. Nine of them got killed along the way, two limped through, and the whole exercise netted a $13 loss. A postmortem on architecture, slippage, and the specific hubris of assuming edge exists where it does not.
Read on Medium - ·AI experiments·20 min
The Algorithmic Gaze: Why I Outsourced My Melancholy to a Server Farm in Northern Virginia
Kevin Shields spent two years and $500,000 chasing a guitar sound. I generated a shoegaze album in forty-two seconds while eating a microwave burrito. A field report from Post-Effort Shoegaze.
Read on Medium - ·Infrastructure·10 min
The Ghost in the Machine: Setting Up a VLESS + Reality VPN for Perfect Stealth
WireGuard and OpenVPN are cooked the moment DPI sees them. Here is how to stand up VLESS + TCP + Reality + XTLS-Vision so your traffic is indistinguishable from a boring HTTPS visit to a real site.
Read on Medium - ·Creative coding·13 min
Roblox vibe coding
My 11-year-old wanted floating islands, gravity flips, and a leaderboard to flex on her squad. Instead of a weekend of Luau pain, we shipped it with Google Antigravity — and watched plays climb from zero to hundreds overnight.
Read on Medium
Selected work
all projects →- 2011 – 2013·CocCoc, Hanoi
CocCoc
Head of Frontend & ToolsRan frontend, tooling, and the search department for Vietnam's home-grown search engine and browser. Ranking, crawling, indexing, onboarding newcomers landing in Hanoi.
SearchRankingFrontend - 2017 – 2022·Amazon, Seattle
Alexa Connect Kit
Senior SDECore contributor on ACK — the platform that lets device makers put Alexa in their products without running their own cloud or firmware stack.
IoTAWSVoice - 2015 – 2017·Groupon, Chicago
Groupon Interface
Tech LeadLed the Groupon Interface team — the consumer web surface across 26 country sites. Shipped deal/auth-flow optimizations against some of the highest traffic on the open e-commerce web.
Consumer webA/BAuth - 2022 – present·Indeed, Seattle
Indeed
Principal Software EngineerCurrent role. Principal Engineer on consumer-scale jobs infrastructure.
Distributed systemsConsumer scale - 2026 – present
Sverklo
CreatorCode intelligence for AI coding agents. A local-first MCP server that gives Claude Code, Cursor, and friends structural understanding of a repo — symbol graphs, blast-radius analysis, diff-aware review — instead of making them re-grep the same files on every turn.
MCPTypeScriptTree-sitter - 2014satire
Часы Пескова / Peskov's Clocks
CreatorA Saturday-morning viral civic-tech artifact: index the ruble value of Dmitry Peskov's alleged $620k watch collection against the state of the Russian economy. Open-sourced on GitHub. Got a Radio Svoboda interview out of it.
Civic techWeekend buildGitHub Pages - 2026satire
Orphaned Threads
CreatorA shoegaze band that does not exist, with a manifesto it did not write, and a server farm in Northern Virginia that agreed to feel sad on my behalf. The artifact behind the Algorithmic Gaze essay.
AI music genArtManifesto
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