About

Hi, I’m Louis Cai (蔡路) — a software engineer with 17 years across Java, mobile and full-stack; now an architect.

I build small things: indie tools, trading systems, experiments. Some of them live. A lot of them die.

🪦 Postmortems

This blog is the home of my postmortem series — honest autopsies of my own dead projects, with real numbers: commits, revenue, traffic, and the exact reasons they died.

• #001 — MailIELTS: an AI IELTS writing coach nobody used. 714 commits, 467 blog posts in 3 languages, 21 months, $0 revenue. Read the autopsy
• #002 — NanoPhotoStudio: an AI portrait studio whose launch never happened. 1,648 commits, 282 PRs, 27 weekly visitors, $0 revenue. Read the autopsy

More autopsies are in the oven.

📚 Archive

The archive also carries my older writing (2018–2021): trading strategy notes (grid, trend-following, martingale), engineering notes, and reading notes. Migrated from my old Hexo blog, kept as-is.

Elsewhere

• GitHub: louis-cai
• X: @louis__cai