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.

I'm currently looking for a new role, after concluding an internship at Nector.

Recently I've been trying to improve performance in the things I build (leaderboard) and learning about databases, and I'm working on a storage engine for one.

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

• Building transactional voice agents at Nector

  Updated: 7 Mar, 2026 |  at  07:09 PM

  Building production ready voice agents, latency optimization, multi tenancy, MCP proxies - six months of building customer facing voice agents

• Breaking the 28k SSE Connection Limit (and Scaling Toward 1M)

  Updated: 23 Jul, 2026 |  at  05:30 AM

  Why my Go leaderboard's capped at exactly 28,232 SSE connections, how Docker networking got me to 150k, and the path toward millions.

• Backpressure in Distributed Systems

  Updated: 23 Jul, 2026 |  at  05:30 AM

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

• Broadcasting to 28K SSE Clients (and learning about Go channels)

  Updated: 23 Jul, 2026 |  at  05:30 AM

  A post on progressively getting my server to 28k SSE connections, finding a bug in my implementation of fan out using Go channels and the resulting mental model update.

• 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.

• 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.

• Scaling Server Sent Events - Intro to SSE and scaling guide

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

  Understanding SSE and it's use cases, advantages over other realtime protocols, how to deploy it at scale.

Recent Posts

• How I use AI

  Published: 28 Jan, 2026 |  at  12:44 AM

  What AI use has improved for me, what I avoid doing and things that have worked best for me so far.

• 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 Agent for LinkedIn Scraping & Candidate Sourcing

  Updated: 23 Jul, 2026 |  at  05:30 AM

  How I built an AI agent that scrapes LinkedIn, scores candidates, and generates personalized outreach, a full recruiting sourcing pipeline in Python and FastAPI.

• 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.