Distributed Systems and Platform Engineer
Hi, I'm Bart. I design backend and platform systems that remain predictable when dependencies fail, messages are duplicated, or workflows outlive a single request. My work focuses on making failure explicit, observable, and recoverable in production.
Resilient external operations
Reliability starts where your control ends.
Engineering focus
Most production failures do not belong to a single service. They happen at the boundaries between applications, queues, providers, storage systems, and operators. My work focuses on making those boundaries easier to reason about and recover from.
Building shared platform capabilities so product teams can focus on building product instead of infrastructure.
Handling duplicate messages, ordering, replay, backpressure, and state transitions to recover safely from failure.
Designing coherent execution policies across retries, timeouts, idempotency, fallbacks, and rate limits.
How I work
A timeout without a retry policy is incomplete. A retry without idempotency may make the problem worse. Reliability comes from treating them as one policy.
I do not abstract ahead of evidence. I look for operational problems that repeatedly slow teams down, then turn the recurring patterns into tools, conventions, and reusable workflows.
Production systems fail. The practical goal is to detect problems early, limit their blast radius, preserve enough context to understand them, and recover without improvisation.
Selected work
Creator & Maintainer
RelPrim is an open-source Python reliability layer for operations that cross process, network, or provider boundaries. It brings retries, timeouts, fallbacks, circuit breakers, validation, and execution reporting into one explicit operation model without hiding the domain decisions that make recovery safe.
Founder & Engineer
Ghostviber is an AI creative platform built around the full songwriting workflow, from the first line to generated audio and artwork. I designed and built the product architecture, multilingual rhyme engine, AI orchestration, credit ledger, asynchronous workflows, storage, and reliability mechanisms needed to turn variable external providers into one coherent user experience.
Background
My approach to reliability comes from building production systems across payments, security, media, commerce, and AI, where failures could not be treated as exceptional events.
Built backend workflows for payment processing and external provider integrations. The work covered webhooks, retries, idempotency, and asynchronous execution, with recovery paths for delayed, duplicated, or partially completed operations.
Developed backend capabilities for applications managing alarm control units and connected security devices in homes and businesses. Commands, device state, and incoming events had to remain predictable because software actions affected physical systems.
Helped evolve backend services for a large consumer video platform. The system had to support secure content delivery, asynchronous processing, and dependable operation under the expectations of a product used at scale.
Created AI-powered workflows for creative tooling and fraud detection, combining external models with asynchronous processing and cloud infrastructure. The work required balancing latency, cost, and reliability without letting technical complexity leak into the product.
Writing
Start here
Retries solve only one failure mode. This article introduces a coherent execution policy for timeouts, retries, idempotency, circuit breakers, rate limits, fallbacks, observability, and recovery at external boundaries.
A practical guide to HTTPX retry policies in Python covering connection failures, 429/5xx responses, exponential backoff, Retry-After, timeouts, async cancellation and idempotency.
How to configure OpenAI timeouts in Python without hiding retries, exceeding operation budgets, or mishandling long reasoning and streaming responses.
Engineering Notes
New articles, open-source releases, and occasional notes from building distributed systems.
Let's talk systems
I help teams shape the systems their products depend on, especially early on or when reliability becomes critical. I also write and speak about these problems. Tell me what you’re building and where it hurts.
