# behind screen (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 2 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover behind screen. Page: Feed: --- ## [Behind The Screens: Pickford Film Center](https://arthouseconvergence.substack.com/p/behind-the-screens-pickford-film) _2026-08-20 · Art House Convergence · Art House Convergence_ Get to know a gem in Bellingham, WA ## [Newsletter](http://localhost:1313/page/newsletter/) _2026-08-14 · Sushant Dhiman_ Subscribe to get posts on backend engineering, distributed systems, Go, databases, and infrastructure. I write about the things I’m building, the problems I encounter, and the lessons I learn along the way—practica ideas, experiments, and engineering insights from building systems in the real world. ## [Behind The Screens: The Athena Cinema](https://arthouseconvergence.substack.com/p/behind-the-screens-the-athena-cinema) _2026-08-06 · Art House Convergence · Art House Convergence_ SCREEN Act, Box Office Records & Member Spotlight: The Athena Cinema ## [Understanding Raft Leader Election by building from scratch](http://localhost:1313/blog/raft/) _2026-08-02 · Sushant Dhiman_ Let’s say you are building distributed software that supports replication (such as a database). There will be multiple nodes running in a distributed environment for that same application. In order to support replication, all the data from one node needs to be copied to other nodes in the network as well. So you came up with an idea of a leader/follower-based system. But now there is a… ## [Behind the Screens: AHC Member Spotlight](https://arthouseconvergence.substack.com/p/behind-the-screens-ahc-member-spotlight-707) _2026-07-23 · Art House Convergence · Art House Convergence_ Get to know Philly's cinéSPEAK ## [About](http://localhost:1313/page/about/) _2026-07-17 · Sushant Dhiman_ Hi, I’m Sushant Dhiman. I’m a backend software engineer passionate about backend systems, networking, databases, backend architecture, distributed systems and low-level software. This website is where I document my software engineering journey by sharing what I learn, build, and explore. I believe the best way to learn engineering is by building things. Instead of only reading about… ## [Guest Post: Putting the Art House in Art House Cinemas](https://arthouseconvergence.substack.com/p/guest-post-putting-the-art-house) _2026-07-09 · Art House Convergence · Art House Convergence_ How indie cinemas are supporting the indie film ecosystem ## [Indie theaters are thriving!](https://arthouseconvergence.substack.com/p/indie-theaters-are-thriving) _2026-06-26 · Art House Convergence · Art House Convergence_ AHC's National Audience Survey results are in. Moviegoers love their art houses. ## [What happens when we bring 750 indie film exhibition professionals together?](https://arthouseconvergence.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-bring-750-indie) _2026-06-11 · Art House Convergence · Art House Convergence_ The answer is: the best community ever (and a highly-spirited round of film trivia!) ## [Built a TCP Load Balancer in C to understand how it actually works.](http://localhost:1313/blog/built-a-network-load-balancer-in-c-to-understand-how-it-actually-works-2/) _2026-06-06 · Sushant Dhiman_ A lot of engineers use load balancers every day. But most of them never go deep enough to understand how it works. I did, and I implemented a Layer 4 load balancer in C to understand how it works. It is not a production-grade solution but is enough to give a core conceptual idea of modern load balancers. Why I built it? I’m a great fan of a quote by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard… ## [Every Channel. One Login. (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/xG1NmlyGQotS) _2026-06-06 · **Sponsored**_ 17,000+ live channels, movies and sports on any device. Free trial, no IP lock. ## [To Merge or Not to Merge: It's NOT a Question](https://arthouseconvergence.substack.com/p/to-merge-or-not-to-merge-its-not) _2026-04-30 · Art House Convergence · Art House Convergence_ How media consolidation affects art house cinemas & independent theaters globally ## [Kafka Fundamentals - Guide to Distributed Messaging](http://localhost:1313/blog/kafka-fundamentals-guide-to-distributed-messaging/) _2026-04-17 · Sushant Dhiman_ Why Kafka Exists? You are building a backend system with multiple services (auth, payments, notifications, analytics). Each service needs to communicate with other services. Issues come when Service A needs to call Service B, and if Service B is down, Service A also fails. This type of communication increases system complexity and scaling problems. This is why Kafka is built. Kafka introduces a… ## [🇨🇦 O, Canada](https://arthouseconvergence.substack.com/p/o-canada) _2026-04-16 · Art House Convergence · Art House Convergence_ A Spotlight on NICE in honor of National Canadian Cinema Day + Best Practices for filmmakers Part 2 ## [Understanding gRPC architecture in simple terms](http://localhost:1313/blog/understanding-grpc-architecture-in-simple-terms/) _2026-04-15 · Sushant Dhiman_ Most tutorials explain how to write a .proto file and call a gRPC method. But very few explain what actually happens after that call. I recently implemented gRPC in one of my projects and while learning it, I tried to understand its architecture from first principles — not just how to use it, but why it is designed this way and why it is fast. This post is a simple breakdown of that. ## [Theatrical Windows Rule!](https://arthouseconvergence.substack.com/p/theatrical-windows-rule) _2026-04-02 · Art House Convergence · Art House Convergence_ + Best practices for filmmakers from AHC - Part 1 ## [HTTP Under the Hood: Here's What Actually Happens](http://localhost:1313/blog/http-under-the-hood-what-actually-happens/) _2026-03-27 · Sushant Dhiman_ Most backend engineers think that HTTP is a stateless request-response protocol. That’s technically correct but not complete. For the last few days I have been reading a lot about HTTP in depth. I’m going to talk about same in this post. In This Post What is HTTP? What is a protocol? What happens when you browser any website? How is this HTTP structured How the server actually reads… ## [Building a Kafka-style commit log from scratch.](http://localhost:1313/blog/kafka-like-commit-log/) _2026-03-20 · Sushant Dhiman_ Recently I was learning how Kafka works internally. So in order to understand it, I built a commit log system from scratch in Golang. Some people might think that Kafka is a message queue and not related to logs. But in reality Kafka is an append-only log system. I’ve discussed this more in this post. In this post we will implement the log system discussed in the previous post from scratch. ## ["Shared spaces are good for humanity" (& for us)](https://arthouseconvergence.substack.com/p/shared-spaces-are-good-for-humanity) _2026-03-19 · Art House Convergence · Art House Convergence_ 2026 Art House Theater Day is Thursday, July 30th! ## [Why Kafka is so fast?](http://localhost:1313/blog/how-kafka-stores-messages-internally/) _2026-03-11 · Sushant Dhiman_ Recently I was exploring RabbitMQ and Kafka to do some POCs. I found that Kafka provides very high throughput, which refers to the ability to process a large number of messages in a short amount of time, as compared to RabbitMQ (not RabbitMQ streams). I started exploring why Kafka is so fast. The main reason behind why Kafka is so fast is the way it stores data on disk and some operating system… ## [🚗 Plan your ultimate art house road trip](https://arthouseconvergence.substack.com/p/plan-your-ultimate-art-house-road) _2026-03-05 · Art House Convergence · Art House Convergence_ 93 reasons to pack your bags & 6 trip ideas from us! ## [Stop CI/CD & Supply-Chain Attacks (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/iKH8kkwASyxe) _2026-03-05 · **Sponsored**_ Per-PR: 17 CI/CD checks and package malware scans with inline Check Run findings. ## [Things I miss about Spring Boot after switching to Go](http://localhost:1313/blog/things-i-miss-about-spring-boot-after-switching-to-go/) _2026-03-05 · Sushant Dhiman_ I wrote production systems for a startup in Java & Spring Boot for 1.5 years before switching to Golang. That was a high-paced startup, so we were shipping features every week. There I got my hands dirty on some absolute backend technologies that are powering business-orientated backends, such as Java, Spring Boot, MySQL, Redis and Kafka. Recently I made a switch to Golang because I wanted to move… ## [Understanding RabbitMQ in simple terms](http://localhost:1313/blog/understanding-rabbitmq/) _2026-02-28 · Sushant Dhiman_ Hi, I hope you all are doing well. Recently I was exploring RabbitMQ, and I found it fascinating. Previously I’ve used Kafka. RabbitMQ is very different from Kafka. This article is mostly useful for beginners or people who haven’t used RabbitMQ. If you are an experienced developer, you might not find anything new in this post. What is RabbitMQ? RabbitMQ (Rabbit Message Queueing) is an… ## [Art House Convergence Has Entered the 'Stack](https://arthouseconvergence.substack.com/p/art-house-convergence-has-entered) _2026-02-23 · Art House Convergence · Art House Convergence_ Why supporting independent exhibition has NEVER been more important ## [Write your own Shell (Terminal) from scratch.](http://localhost:1313/blog/write-your-own-shell-terminal-from-scratch/) _2026-02-22 · Sushant Dhiman_ Hi, I am on my way to becoming a better engineer. So I am building stuff that people don’t build and learn outside their job. I am currently learning about operating systems and how they work. But instead of following the old textbook reading approach, I am doing this by building some projects along the way. In order to understand processes, I have decided to build a shell from scratch. This… ## [nil in Go Is Not What You Think](http://localhost:1313/blog/nil-in-go-is-not-what-you-think/) _2026-02-12 · Sushant Dhiman_ Recently I was watching a GopherCon talk on YouTube that was published in 2016. The speaker spoke about “nil”. After watching that 30 minutes talk, my views about Nil are completely changed. In this post we will discuss exactly the same things that he talked about. This post is not going to be a very long post, so it will be easy for you to get the key points from that talk. But I will… ## [How Computers Work: Explained from First Principles](http://localhost:1313/blog/how-computers-work-explained-from/) _2026-02-02 · Sushant Dhiman_ If you are following my blog, you might know that my plan for this year is to learn and program low-level systems. I wanted to develop an operating system since I was in college. I never got enough time back then. But now I have plenty of time to work on skills other than my job. I spent last month learning about how a computer is basically made and how a CPU performed all these magical tasks from… ## [How Uber Shows Millions of Drivers Locations In Realtime | EP: 4 Behind The Screen](http://localhost:1313/blog/how-uber-shows-millions-of-drivers/) _2026-01-03 · Sushant Dhiman_ This is the 4th episode of my series Behind The Screen, where I’m discussing the workings of tech that enhance our daily life in the simplest way. Recently I was reading how Uber’s backend system handles so many real-time location events, and I found that the system which handles it is quite interesting. So I’m talking about my learnings in this blog post. All the information provided in this post… ## [How Rate Limiter protect your system from abuse! EP: 3 Behind The Screen](http://localhost:1313/blog/how-rate-limiter-protect-your-system/) _2025-12-28 · Sushant Dhiman_ This is the 3rd episode of my series Behind The Screen, where I’m discussing the workings of tech that enhance our daily life in the simplest way. In this episode we are going to discuss: What are rate limiters.? What problem the solve? How they work? Rate Limiting Algorithms. IMPORTANT - This post is for beginners who want to understand rate limiters. If you are an experienced developer and… ## [How Search Engines finds your website - Web Crawlers?](http://localhost:1313/blog/how-search-engines-explore-the-entire/) _2025-12-27 · Sushant Dhiman_ This is the 2nd episode of my series Behind The Screen, where I’m discussing the workings of tech that enhance our daily life in the simplest way. Web crawlers are software that only a few people know about, but they play a major role in today’s tech. Without web crawlers, our search engines will not be able to show us search results. In this post we will discuss how web crawlers work by learning… ## [How Email Actually Works](http://localhost:1313/blog/how-email-actually-works-ep-1-behind/) _2025-12-25 · Sushant Dhiman_ Email is a technology that you use every single day. It is actually very interesting how emails are handled behind the scenes and reach the recipient’s mailbox. In this post I’ll explain it in a simple way. Basic Terminologies These are some terms that you must know before reading this post. SMTP : Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. A TCP-based communication pattern used to receive and deliver mail.… ## [Crush Every Threat in Real Time (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/hkHvhqI3Eps2) _2025-12-25 · **Sponsored**_ One agent for real-time detection, exposure tracking, and active defense. ## [CS Books I'll be reading in 2026.](http://localhost:1313/blog/cs-books-ill-be-reading-in-2026/) _2025-12-22 · Sushant Dhiman_ Hi, 2025 has come to an end. It was a wonderful year for me, and I hope it was for you too. I worked with different tech stacks, including Golang, Java, Spring Boot, Linux, MySQL, Cassandra, ClickHouse, Kafka and encryption algorithms. But one thing that bothers me is “we work with computers on a high level” and we really don’t know how a computer works, how memory works and all that stuff. That’s… ## [Why Cassandra can handle massive writes without bottlenecks](http://localhost:1313/blog/inside-cassandra/) _2025-10-14 · Sushant Dhiman_ Hi, I’ve been reading about Apache Cassandra since the last 2 weeks. I spent time reading a lot of online blogs and then ended up reading Cassandra: The Definitive Guide. In this post we will discuss what makes Cassandra so much faster, more scalable and how it can handle massive writes without bottlenecks. Before that we need to understand What Cassandra really is and how is it different from… ## [Let's Write a Threaded File Compression Tool with Memory Control](http://localhost:1313/blog/writing-parallel-file-compression/) _2025-06-22 · Sushant Dhiman_ This weekend I was diving deep into concurrent programming to learn that, I decided to write a threaded file compressor, which will not only compress files concurrently but also limit the memory usage. I have implemented this in GoLang, but these concepts can be implemented in any language. What I’ve Developed? I designed a tool that reads files in chunks and limits the overall memory used by… ## [Writing Load Balancer From Scratch In 250 Line of Code](http://localhost:1313/blog/writing-load-balancer-from-scratch/) _2025-06-15 · Sushant Dhiman_ Hey, everyone. It’s another weekend, and I was exploring what to build. So I decided to build a simple yet completely functional load balancer. Let’s discuss it in this post. What is a load balancer? A load balancer is a component in a system that distributes requests evenly between servers. It is used in large-scale systems where a large number of requests need to be handled… ## [Let's Write a JSON Parser From Scratch](http://localhost:1313/blog/lets-write-a-json-parser-from-scratch/) _2025-06-01 · Sushant Dhiman_ Hi, It’s been a long time since I wrote something in this newsletter. Recently I was learning about language parsing and abstract syntax trees. After getting some knowledge about this, I decided to write a JSON parser from scratch. Parsing: It is the process of analysing the structure of a string (basically any programming language syntax). Parsing helps us to determine the meaning of the… ## [Let's Understand & Implement Consistent Hashing](http://localhost:1313/blog/lets-implement-consistent-hashing/) _2025-02-27 · Sushant Dhiman_ Recently I’ve been learning about distributed systems and I came across a very interesting concept “Consistent Hashing”. It is one of the most basic thing in Distributed Systems. What is Consistent Hashing? Consistent hashing is a key distribution technique that ensures easy and smooth mapping of keys to servers to minimize data movement when nodes are added or removed. Unlike… ## [I Made a Configurable Rate Limiter… Because APIs Can’t Say ‘Chill’](http://localhost:1313/blog/i-made-a-configurable-rate-limiter/) _2025-02-22 · Sushant Dhiman_ I made a configurable rate limiter. In this post I am going to talk about that. We will discuss its architecture and how it works. Rate Limiter Rate limiting is a technique that controls the number of requests that can be made to an API within a specific interval of time. Although it is not a very new concept, it has been used for a long time. But I haven’t made a traditional rate limiter;…