Lorbic

A single unbuffered channel send without an active receiver is enough to silently lock up a production worker pool, leaking memory until your service gets killed by the OS kernel. On the surface, Go channels look simple: they synchronize concurrent execut

Generating a raw matrix of integer tiles gives you a map layout, but it doesn't give you a living environment. When I loaded my first level into Derelict Facility , the engine had no concept of what a "Laboratory" or a "Reactor Room" was. It just saw a fl

Linux crontab is one of the most elegant pieces of software ever written for single-host automation. It is simple, clear, and has kept Unix systems running reliably since 1975. The problem starts when we take a single-host tool and deploy it across a mult

Building a terminal-based engine in pure ASCII looks cool for about five minutes. Then you try rendering a complex facility map with corners, T-junctions, and status icons, and raw character cells start feeling incredibly limiting. Two specific problems h

When I started building Derelict Facility , my initial instinct for game actors was standard Object-Oriented design: create an Entity struct, add pointers for position, sprite, and stats, and store them in a slice ( Entity ). It worked fine for five entit

In a href="https://lorbic.com/posts/2026-07-01-how-multi-tenant-saas-works/" data-preview-title="How Multi-Tenant SaaS Actually Works" data-preview-desc="A complete system design of Relay, a multi-tenant AI API gateway. Covers multi-tenant database archit

Most Couchbase performance tickets I have seen end the same way: someone adds more nodes, the dashboard looks a little better for a week, and the same query shows up in the slow log a month later. The node count was never the problem. The index was. This

A few weeks ago I designed Relay , a multi-tenant AI API gateway, as a system design exercise. That post covered the database, the auth, the billing. It did not cover the thing every one of those systems is sitting behind: the API itself. Here is the ques

There is a moment in every backend engineer's life when their database starts refusing connections. Picture 2 a.m. on a Tuesday. The app is operating under normal traffic, nothing unusual. But the database connection pool is saturated. Queries are timing

There is a class of bugs that only happen at midnight. Your API has a rate limit: 1000 requests per minute. A client hits 999 at 11:59:59 PM, then fires another 999 at 12:00:00 AM. Two windows, two clean counters, all 1998 requests allowed. Your database