documentation beyond code comments
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 Mirakl we are scaling marketplace infrastructure across 110+ countries, handling billions in GMV. the technical challenges are fascinating from event-driven architectures, seller experience optimization to distributed systems. but moving from managing 300+ machines at Qarnot to high-traffic applications at Axopen to marketplace connectivity at Mirakl taught me something: the most valuable insights are not in the code, they are in the decisions.
why did we choose Kafka over RabbitMQ for that specific use case? what happens when your temporary solution becomes the foundation everyone builds on? these stories matter because they are the difference between a junior developer who can implement a solution and a senior engineer who understands the trade-offs.
i am not interested in writing another generic tech blog with "10 best practices for microservices" posts. instead you'll find real workplace scenarios, the 3AM production incidents, the architecture decisions that seemed obvious in hindsight, the times when the wrong solution was actually right.
i am documenting this journey because i want to understand not just how to build systems that scale, but why certain approaches work and others fail. i want to capture the lessons before they become unconscious competence.
this is primarily my notebook, made public. let's see what we learn.