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The Backend Engineer's Playbook

Technical Journal // The Backend Engineer's Playbook
Aug '26

Designing a Usage-Based Billing Pipeline for SaaS

A deep technical guide to designing a robust, provider-agnostic billing pipeline for usage-based SaaS. Covers subscription state machines, idempotent event processing, automated dunning logic, credit notes, and metered invoice generation with full SQL schemas, Mermaid diagrams, and Go snippets.

Jul '26

Couchbase Index Best Practices and Query Performance Tuning

A practical field guide to Couchbase indexing. Covers primary vs GSI indexes, composite key ordering, index-order sorting, covering and partial indexes, array indexes (including replacing OR and LIKE), IntersectScan and UnionScan avoidance, replication and partitioning, projection selectivity, the ADVISE and INFER tools, scan consistency, and pagination, all with runnable SQL++ (N1QL) examples against the travel-sample dataset.

Jul '26

API Design for Backend Systems

A practical, opinionated guide to designing backend APIs. Covers request and response schema, offset and keyset pagination, BFF, server-driven UI, caching, versioning, naming, the new HTTP QUERY verb, WebSocket vs SSE, API security (auth headers, server-to-server auth, webhook receivers), and bulk data load APIs. Built around Relay, the same AI proxy system from the multi-tenant SaaS post, with REST and JSON as the running example and Go code throughout.

Jul '26

Cache-Driven Development: Saving Your Database From Itself

How to use cache to prevent your database from getting hammered. Understanding cache mechanics, types, strategies, and when each one wins.

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

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.

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.

Mar '26

Understanding CPU Caches in Go

A practical guide to understanding how CPU caches (L1/L2/L3) impact Go service performance, with benchmarks on modern hardware.