Hey everyone,

I've been digging into MEV on Ethereum, and what started as trying to understand how sandwich attacks and transaction ordering work turned into building a bot with several working features.

The rabbit hole goes deeper than I expected. There's a big difference between understanding a strategy on paper and dealing with transaction timing, liquidity, execution constraints, and the possibility that conditions change before a transaction lands.

I'm interested in how other developers approach the engineering side of this, particularly transaction monitoring, strategy simulation, and execution reliability.

For those who've built MEV searchers or similar Ethereum tooling, what turned out to be the hardest part to get right once you moved beyond the theory?

I'm happy to discuss what I've been exploring and exchange technical ideas.

I want to build an MEV bot. Before going further I'd appreciate the shed of light of ETH veterans on what to keep notes of and how to proceed.

My roadmap is as follows:

1- Learn rust, solidity, DeFi protocols: Uniswap / Sushiswap, Lending protocols: AAVE

2- Test with anvil and alchemy since my laptop can't hold the base mainnet fork

This road will consume a lot of time studying and practicing. But I want to be precise in what to spend time on.

Any advice on building the stack, design architecture, estimated time for each subject with a general programming background or if this is too late and saturated already since it seems that I'm late for this, is valued.