Systems & Sidequests

Welcome to Systems & Sidequests

I'm Pranshu Raj, a backend engineer and systems thinker. This is my blog about backend systems, real-time infrastructure, and building useful software.

I write to understand, I share to remember.

This space is dedicated to exploring complex technical topics, dissecting real-world systems, and sharing the journey of creating better software.

Featured

• 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

• 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.

• 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.