Welcome to FIREgeeks.net. I’m Vincenzo Ciaglia, former Principal Architect at Amazon Web Services (13 years there), and I’ve been building software for around two decades. This is where I write about what happens when someone who’s spent way too long debugging distributed systems starts applying the same mindset to personal finance. Fair warning: this is a personal blog, not financial advice. Everything here is my own experiment—test it against your reality before doing anything with it.
Why start another personal finance blog?
Because I kept running into the same questions and needed a public notebook to work through them:
- Can we borrow some of the debugging heuristics we use for distributed systems and apply them to portfolio design? What if your investments could “degrade gracefully” when markets get weird?
- What happens when you back-test those FIRE playbooks everyone talks about with European data—actual tax codes, real ETF availability, currency risk—instead of just assuming U.S. scenarios?
- Which pieces of automation (savings pipelines, rebalancing jobs) actually keep working once you’re the fallible human running them month after month?
FIREgeeks is where I publish what I find—missteps included. Expect data-heavy posts, lessons learned the hard way, and a lot of “here’s what broke and why.”
What you’ll find here
- Personal finance through a builder’s lens: deep dives into savings rates, withdrawal strategies, risk management—the usual suspects, but from someone who thinks in systems.
- FinTech experiments: small coding projects, API mashups, dashboards that make money decisions a bit more measurable.
- Tools I actually use: if a spreadsheet, script, or visualization earns a permanent spot in my workflow, I’ll document it so you can adapt it.
All of this sits alongside the FIRE calculator at firegeeks.net/firecalc, which lets me (and you) stress-test plans without waiting decades for the market to tell us if we got it right.
How to follow along
- Bookmark the home page for new posts.
- Try the FIRE calculator at firegeeks.net/firecalc.
- Send feedback, “have you tried this?” questions, or ideas to vinciaglia(at)gmail.com.
If something here sparks an idea, run it through your own filters, talk to a professional if you need to, and see if it survives the real world. Then let me know what you learned—this blog works best when the experiments compound.