Don't just read about failure modes. Simulate them.
I'm Raza Basit. I design tactile, zero-setup architectural simulators modeling distributed concurrency limits, database bottlenecks, and CPU cache physics — paired with production remediation playbooks.
Production Architecture in Motion
Explore cascading failure modes, buffer pool exhaustion, and algorithmic cliffs with real-time controls and senior engineer remediation playbooks.
API & Database Connection Pool Limits
Interactive architecture simulator for Little's Law, database connection pool exhaustion, cascading 504 timeouts, and circuit breaker load shedding.
Kafka Partitions & The Mega-Customer Bottleneck
Model Kafka consumer lag, partition hot-spots, and why adding workers cannot solve partition skew due to the 1-worker-per-partition invariant.
The Lost Order Mystery: Dual-Writes vs. Transactional Outbox
Simulate silent data loss under network failure with naive dual-writes vs guaranteed consistency with the Transactional Outbox pattern.
Database Indexes: Single-Key, Compound, and Covering Indexes
Interactive simulator modeling Full Table Scans vs Single-Key, Compound, and Covering Indexes (Index-Only Scan with 0 heap fetches), plus the column order trap.
Big-O in Production: Operations, Latency & The Cache Trap
Interactive systems simulator modeling algorithmic time complexity (O(1), O(log N), O(N), O(N log N), O(N²)) against real CPU cycles, RAM, and hardware cache lines.
Production Debriefs & Case Studies
In-depth post-mortems, mathematical proofs, and architectural patterns backing the interactive simulators.
Building a Distributed Rate Limiter in Go
Rate limiting looks simple until production traffic arrives. This end-to-end series traces the complete architectural evolution: from a naive single-mutex in-memory structure to shard-partitioned locks, algorithmic tradeoffs, and finally a distributed multi-node Redis implementation.
The Sliding Window
Concurrent locks, window tracking, and memory leak prevention.
Scaling with Map Sharding
Eliminating stop-the-world lock contention across 256 shards.
The Token Bucket Algorithm
Handling traffic bursts gracefully with constant-time replenishment.
Redis-Backed Coordination
Multi-instance horizontal scaling with atomic Redis Lua scripts.
The Hidden Cost of Overfetching — How a NAT Gateway Spike Led Us Down a Rabbit Hole
Dependency Pinning in JavaScript — Why It Matters More Than You Think
Git + Shell: Run Tooling Only on Files You Actually Changed
Featured Systems & Tools
safe-sqlite-mcp-go
A single-binary Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in Go that safely exposes SQLite databases to AI agents with immutable connection guardrails.
go install github.com/raza-basit/safe-sqlite-mcp-go@latestSubscribe via RSS or follow on GitHub
I publish long-form technical tutorials and systems engineering post-mortems. No newsletters spam—pure RSS and open code.