Engineering

Technical Journal // Engineering
Jul '26

Designing a Distributed Rate Limiter with Redis

A full system design of a production rate limiter. Covers every major algorithm (token bucket, sliding window, leaky bucket, fixed window), their tradeoffs, how they break in a distributed system, how Redis fixes them, and how Stripe, Cloudflare, and API gateways actually deploy this in production.

Jul '26

How Multi-Tenant SaaS Actually Works

A complete system design of Relay, a multi-tenant AI API gateway. Covers multi-tenant database architecture (silo vs pool vs bridge), API key authentication, provider routing with failover, dual-layer rate limiting, token-based billing, response caching, row-level security, tenant provisioning, and observability. Full Postgres schemas, mermaid diagrams, and Go snippets included.

Jun '26

So, We Are Writing Efficient Software Again

RAM is up 400%. CPUs cost 15% more. The free hardware lunch is finally over. Welcome back to the 80s, where every byte counts.

Jun '26

Constructing Concurrent Inverted Indexes in Go

Building a thread-safe inverted index from scratch in Go. Covers sharded mutexes, lock contention profiling, slice pooling to avoid GC pressure, and benchmark comparisons against a naive sync.RWMutex approach under varying read/write ratios.

Jun '26

A Love Letter to the L1 Cache

Why reordering two struct fields made my loop 30% faster, and what it taught me about how CPUs actually work.

Jun '26

Wireless ADB When Your Network Fights You

How to connect ADB over Wi-Fi using a one-time USB handshake, even when a VPN or firewall blocks the direct connection.

May '26

Why Explaining Technical Difficulty is Hard

"It's just a simple query". Why the distance between a logical requirement and its infrastructure cost is the most expensive gap in engineering.

May '26

Just About Go Time

A breakdown of the absolute absurdity of human time, monotonic clocks in Go, and the one true way to store time across PostgreSQL, Couchbase, and mobile clients.

May '26

Building a Poor Document Store inside PostgreSQL

A forensic analysis of why abusing JSONB for schemaless architecture leads to write amplification, TOAST bloat, and catastrophic query planner failures.

May '26

PostgreSQL Migrations in Go: Production Schema Patterns with Goose

Execute transactional SQL migrations in Go using Goose. Covers lock avoidance, rollback safety, version tracking, and embedding migration SQL in Go binaries.