Hi I am Mathieu Baurin. I build distributed systems, avoid sitting still too long, and document the journey. Currently scaling marketplace infrastructu...
the simple ticket "remove the aggregators filter and add those values to the methods filter instead." that was the ticket. seemed straightforward. the ui had two separate filters for integration methods - one for "Method" and one for "Aggregators." we needed to merge them into one. i opened the codebase. found the column: legacy_categories . found the enum: CategoryType . my first instinct was to…
the data looked perfect my garmin watch said i was ready. training load: optimal. recovery time: 12 hours. hrv looked good. so i laced up for another tempo run. it was tuesday. i had already run sunday, cycled during the week, and crushed a threshold session on thursday. but the numbers said i could handle it. and i trusted the numbers more than i trusted how i felt. halfway through the run, my…
8:23am. slack notification: "Urgent, seller paid yesterday but cannot access anything." i am the firefighter for the day, first responder for production issues during business hours. one seller, one access issue. should be simple. it was not... the cascade within 20 minutes, one issue becomes five: support: "need immediate resolution" PM: "related to yesterday's deployment ?" account manager:…
the rush projects at école 42 taught me something i did not expect to learn. we would work until 4am, sometimes later. three or four of us huddled around screens, debugging some memory leak that made no sense. i remember thinking i had to be the one to find the solution first. had to prove i belonged there. but the best solutions came when someone would say "wait, what if we are thinking about…
last week during a code review session, one of my colleagues made a comment that stuck with me. "mathieu, maybe try coding a bit slower next time." not in a mean way, but in that gentle way that makes you realize something important. i have been pushing code fast since i started this job. really fast. the kind of fast where you finish a feature, push it up, and immediately start thinking about the…
i thought building a personal finance app would be straightforward. connect to my bank, pull transactions, categorize spending, done. maybe add some charts, track my ridiculous coffee expenses, finally understand where my money actually goes. then i met open banking APIs. turns out "open" is like saying a maze is "accessible." technically true, but you might die trying to find the exit. the naive…
i wanted to contribute to open source but had no idea where to start. most projects felt too intimidating, too complex, or too far from what i actually understood. then i found a GitHub issue in StarRocks asking for a format_bytes() function. simple request: convert raw byte counts to human readable formats like "4.00 KB" instead of "4096". i understood the problem. i could write the solution. so…
i have been writing code comments for years that explain what the system does, but the why behind the decisions? the messy human problems that led to elegant technical solutions? that stuff lives in slack threads and dies in meeting notes. this blog is my attempt to document the journey, not just the destination. at my current company we are scaling marketplace infrastructure across 110+…