Haggle is an auction platform. People list things, other people bid on them in real time, some of them haggle over the price afterwards, and then somebody has to actually pick the item up or ship it. Every one of those steps is a system we run, and most of them are the kind of thing that only gets interesting once it has real money and a countdown clock attached.
We’re a small team, which means the person who designed the bidding engine is also the person who gets paged when it misbehaves at 2am on a Saturday. That is a good forcing function for writing things down. This site is where those notes go.
What you’ll find here
- Design notes on the services behind Haggle: how bids are ordered, how a negotiation session is stored and replayed, how pickup queues work.
- Incident write-ups, once the dust has settled and we understand what happened.
- Small, practical things. Tooling we like, AWS gotchas, the occasional Go or TypeScript pattern that saved us a week.
Each post gets a lot number, because we couldn’t resist. They don’t go up for auction.
If you’d like to work with us, the team page has the people and the what we do page has the systems. If something here is wrong, tell us; being corrected in public is cheaper than being wrong in production.