Kinetix

A real-time e-commerce and fulfilment platform, documented from the code outward — for engineers who build against it, and for engineers who want to learn distributed backend design from a system that actually runs.

What this site is

Kinetix runs catalogue, checkout, payment, warehouse fulfilment and courier dispatch as independent services. Each service owns its data and its database. Services talk to each other over gRPC, against contracts defined once in kinetix-contracts. Outside traffic enters through a single Kong gateway, and identity is the only service that decides who a caller is.

These pages explain why it is built that way, what each service is responsible for, and the contracts between them. Every page is written against the code it describes and links to that code at a fixed commit, so what you read is what runs.

Building against Kinetix

Contracts, endpoints, authentication and error semantics for clients and integrations.

Learning backend from Kinetix

Real problems — overselling, double charges, partial failure across services — and the code that solves them, step by step. Assumes you know HTTP, SQL and one backend language.

Services

Service	Owns	Language
identity	Accounts, authentication, tokens, merchant approval	TypeScript
catalog	Products and categories	Python
pricing	Prices, discounts, vouchers, flash sales, shipping rates	Rust
order	Cart, checkout, orders, returns	C#
payment	Payments, escrow, wallet	Java
warehouse	Bin inventory, stock reservation, fulfilment tasks	Ruby
matching	Courier allocation and dispatch	Elixir
review	Product reviews	PHP
notification	Customer notifications	Scala
communication	Real-time chat	C++
search	Product search	Go

Around them sit the API gateway (Kong), the courier app (Flutter) and the contracts (Protocol Buffers) every service conforms to.