[CrunchyJams]

This is simply not accurate.

I build financial market infrastructure and in the last twelve months I've seen companies in my industry presenting at AWS and Splunk conferences, and a Cassandra meetup.

There are lots of great technologists in the space that are just like the rest of us and love sharing ideas. There are definitely NDAs in place, but "financial infrastructure" generally refers to processing systems, not trading systems. The former is increasingly utilized, while the latter generates alpha (i.e. where you actually make money).

People like sharing ideas about processing infrastructure because everyone benefits when the rest of the market gets better at it also. Your efficiency is only as good as your counterparties' efficiency. If their system breaks, you still have a broken trade that costs you operational time and money no matter how good your infrastructure is.

There is a lot more wrong with what this author wrote, but in the interest of time I'll keep my answer to the question asked.