Pranshu Raj

Hey, I'm Pranshu, a backend engineer and database geek.

I've been creating software and doing weird experiments in backend engineering and machine learning for a couple years now.

Right now I'm an SDE intern working on voice agents at Nector.

Recently I've been trying to improve performance in the things I build (leaderboard) and learning about databases, and I plan to build one soon.

I write about software that I create or read about. I'm an enthusiastic (yet terrible) chess player, and I like reading books and manga.

Featured

• Breaking the 28k SSE connection barrier

  Updated: 14 Dec, 2025 |  at  12:40 AM

  How I figured out the issue that was limiting my leaderboard to 28232 SSE connections, fixed it and a framework to reach 1 million.

• Backpressure in Distributed Systems

  Updated: 7 Oct, 2025 |  at  04:22 PM

  Understanding what it is, how to deal with it, where it's used and how I handled it in the real time leaderboard.

• 28K+ connections, zero messages

  Updated: 28 Aug, 2025 |  at  04:30 PM

  How I learnt about Go's concurrency patterns the hard way.

• How I Shrunk My Docker Image size by 48x (and Cut Build Time in Half)

  Updated: 31 Jul, 2025 |  at  10:55 PM

  How to optimize (and benchmark) docker image builds for build time and image size.

• Scaling Server Sent Events - A practical guide to 28,000+ concurrent connections

  Updated: 29 Jun, 2025 |  at  12:31 PM

  Understanding Server Sent events and it's use cases, advantages over other realtime protocols.

• Building a Python Package to Turn Unstructured Data into Financial Insights

  Updated: 23 Jun, 2025 |  at  02:20 PM

  How we built concall-parser to extract structured insights from messy earnings call transcripts, dealing with PDFs, text processing, and speaker identification challenges.

Recent Posts

• Building a scalable real time leaderboard

  Updated: 14 Nov, 2025 |  at  10:42 PM

  Describing my journey of building the leaderboard, what I learnt, what issues I faced, and some design decisions (which will be elaborated on later).

• Blogs (and discussions, threads) that I found interesting

  Updated: 31 Jul, 2025 |  at  10:55 PM

  Collection of blogs, discussions, threads on twitter I found interesting, which I intend to explore deeply.

• Tech I find interesting

  Updated: 31 Jul, 2025 |  at  10:55 PM

  Collection of tech I found interesting, which I intend to explore sometime in the future.

• Building an AI LinkedIn Sourcing Agent (Full version)

  Updated: 1 Jul, 2025 |  at  12:52 PM

  How I built a complete recruiting pipeline that finds candidates, scores them intelligently, and generates personalized outreach

• Designing a minimal, local-first version of lichess.

  Published: 10 May, 2025 |  at  08:52 PM

  How I'm planning to build tinychess, and what I've learnt so far while preparing to build it.

• A quick introduction to data modeling in real world applications

  Published: 13 Apr, 2025 |  at  08:52 PM

  What data modeling is, why it's so useful, how can we do it effectively to get the best results for our use case.