https://blog.chaitanyashahare.com/tags/networking/Recent content in Networking on Chaitanya's blogHugoen2025 | Chaitanya ShahareTue, 16 Jun 2026 18:30:00 +0530https://blog.chaitanyashahare.com/posts/reverse-proxy-from-scratch/Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:30:00 +0530https://blog.chaitanyashahare.com/posts/reverse-proxy-from-scratch/<p>For two years I copy-pasted nginx configs without actually knowing what nginx was doing. <code>proxy_pass http://localhost:3000</code> — sure, it works, ship it. But every time something broke in prod, I was guessing. I had no mental model of what happened between a client request arriving and my Express app receiving it.</p> <p>So I spent an afternoon building a tiny reverse proxy in Node.js. About 40 lines. And now nginx config files make complete sense to me.</p>https://blog.chaitanyashahare.com/posts/bittorrent-choke-algorithm/Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0530https://blog.chaitanyashahare.com/posts/bittorrent-choke-algorithm/<p>You know that one group project where two people did everything and three people collected the grade? That&rsquo;s what early P2P networks looked like. Napster, Gnutella — studies found up to 70% of users sharing zero files. The people actually uploading got throttled into the ground, and the whole thing quietly died.</p> <p>BitTorrent fixed this. The mechanism is called the choke algorithm, and after implementing it myself while building <strong>Bad Peer</strong> (a BitTorrent client I tuned to cut bandwidth waste ~40%), I think it&rsquo;s one of the most underrated pieces of distributed systems design I&rsquo;ve ever read.</p>