Since my original launch post for syntaqlite, I’ve been quietly working away on it in the background. A lot of the work has been fixing correctness bugs which I discovered as I integrated it into production as the parser for PerfettoSQL in the Perfetto trace processor: as I wrote previously, this has been my dream...

I came across Iroh (via, via) today as it hit 1.0 and found it a really interesting solution to a problem I knew existed but had not thought a lot about. Judging from the comment sections, it seems pretty clear that lots of people are confused as to exactly what Iroh is. I don’t think their launch post does their...

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been receiving more security bug reports for Perfetto’s trace processor than I ever have before, all of them found by AI. And I’m very happy about it! These are bugs that would almost certainly not have been found a year ago and it feels good to close these loopholes even though...

Eurovision was on yesterday. I’ve never been interested much in the musical side but the weird political dynamics of Eurovision voting have always fascinated me; I tune in each year just for them and somewhat snarky commentary of Graham Norton, the UK commentator. As I was watching the jury votes come in, a question...

In my work on Perfetto, a performance debugging tool, one question I get often is: “how do I split a Perfetto trace into multiple files?” Instead of answering directly, I say: “there isn’t an easy way to do that, but what’s leading you to collect traces large enough to want to split?” This is one of my golden rules...

For eight years, I’ve wanted a high-quality set of devtools for working with SQLite. Given how important SQLite is to the industry1, I’ve long been puzzled that no one has invested in building a really good developer experience for it2. A couple of weeks ago, after ~250 hours of effort over three months3 on...

Most SQL tools treat SQLite as a “flavor” of a generic SQL parser. They approximate the language, which means they break on SQLite-exclusive features like virtual tables, miss syntax like UPSERT, and ignore the 22 compile-time flags that change the syntax SQLite accepts. So I built syntaqlite: an open-source parser,...

We’ve recently been looking into optimizing rendering performance of the Perfetto UI on large traces. We discovered that there was some inefficiency in our data fetching logic, especially when you’re very zoomed out. In this case, there can be a lot of slices (spans) which are so small that they take less than one...

Over the last few weeks, three new products have announced themselves on Hacker News to great success, each making the frontpage: Sprites (fly.io) with 508 votes and hit #7 exe.dev with 457 votes and hit #2 shellbox.dev with 316 votes and hit #4 All three have a very simple pitch: they will give you full access to...

When I was a junior engineer, my manager would occasionally confide his frustrations to me in our weekly 1:1s. He would point out a project another team was working on and say, “I don’t believe that project will go anywhere, they’re solving the wrong problem.” I used to wonder, “But you are very senior, why don’t...

Two people. Eighteen accounts spanning checking, savings, credit cards, investments. Three currencies. Twenty minutes of work every week. One net worth number I actually trust. The payoff: A single, trustworthy net worth number growing over time. No app did exactly what I needed, so I built my own personal finance...

Just a quick note documenting some recent changes to the blog. Nothing groundbreaking, but enough accumulated updates that I wanted to write them down. Homepage Redesign The homepage used to be a chronological list of articles; your classic default blog format. I’ve redesigned it into more of a two-pane “dashboard”...