Anton Mercier developer · writer · occasional tinkerer

// est. 2019 · Paris → remote

Building things.
Writing about
the gaps.

Full-stack developer with a soft spot for system design, distributed architecture, and the kind of bugs that only appear on Fridays at 4 pm.

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🧑‍💻

Based in France · UTC+1

Go TypeScript Rust Linux Postgres Docker Nginx
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Recent Writing

Why I Stopped Trusting "Zero Config" Reverse Proxies

Default configs hide a lot of sins. I spent a weekend auditing what three popular tools actually do with your TLS certificates before you read the docs.

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Context Propagation Is Not Magic — It's a Contract

Most Go developers reach for context.WithValue without thinking about what propagation actually means at the boundary between services.

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Systemd for Developers Who Don't Want to Become Sysadmins

You don't need to know everything about systemd. You just need to know enough to not accidentally restart nginx at 3 am on a production box.

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Postgres Connection Pooling: The Numbers Nobody Tells You

After running benchmarks on three different pooling strategies in production, the results were genuinely surprising — and a little embarrassing.

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Six Months With Rust in Production: Honest Notes

The borrow checker is not your enemy. The compile times might be. A realistic look at what it's actually like to ship Rust code on a small team.

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The Deployment That Taught Me to Read Logs Differently

A three-hour incident postmortem. Everything was in the logs the whole time. We just weren't looking in the right place — or asking the right questions.

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02

About

I'm Anton Mercier, a developer based in France with about eight years of professional experience across startups, agencies, and a brief, educational stint at a company that shall remain nameless.

I work mostly in Go and TypeScript, with occasional detours into Rust when performance genuinely requires it (and sometimes when it doesn't, which is how you learn). I care a lot about system reliability, clean API design, and the kind of documentation that future-you will actually thank present-you for writing.

This blog started as a way to keep notes for myself. It turns out other people sometimes find the notes useful, which is a nice side effect. I write about things I've actually built, broken, or had to debug at inconvenient hours.

Outside of code: cycling, bad science fiction, good coffee, and an ongoing attempt to read more books than I buy.

03

Contact

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