Lately I’ve been reading Sean Goedecke’s essays on being a Staff+ engineer. His work (particularly Software engineering under the spotlight and It’s Not Your Codebase) is razor-sharp and feels painfully familiar to anyone in Big Tech. On paper, I fit the mold he describes: I’m a Senior Staff engineer at Google. Yet,...

It’s Friday at 4pm. I’ve just closed my 12th bug of the week. My brain is completely fried. And I’m staring at the bug leaderboard, genuinely sad that Monday means going back to regular work. Which is weird because I love regular work. But fixit weeks have a special place in my heart. What’s a fixit, you ask? Once a...

If you do Linux systems programming, you will have likely pored over man pages, either on the command line or, my personal preference, using the excellent man7.org or linux.die.net. I’ve always seen the numbers in sleep(3) and read(2) and idly wondered what they meant, but never actually bothered to look them up....

Last week, I came across Don’t Build an Audience. It’s a fascinating post and has been occupying a lot of my “free thinking” time. I strongly suggest reading it as it’s well written and excellently argued. To summarise what it tries to say: The market for written content on the web (blog posts, articles etc) is...

As an “SQLite consultant” for my local area of Google, I often have people come to me having written SQL like: SELECT CAST(bar AS STRING) AS baz FROM foo and ask me “Why is baz always an integer?! Have I hit an SQLite bug?”. I have to again reach for my list of “odd quirks that SQLite has that people don’t know...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about “The Documentation System” and how valuable I found it. As I dug deeper into researching how best to apply the principles outlined there, I came across Diátaxis. Written by the same author after they left Divio, Diátaxis is a distillation of all the principles with much more guidance...

I gave a talk at the 2025 Tracing Summit last month titled “Perfetto: The Swiss Army Knife of Linux Client/Embedded Tracing”. My goal in this talk was to show how Linux kernel, systems and embedded developers can use Perfetto when debugging and root-causing performance issues in their respective domains. Even though...

Sometimes you run into a truly inspirational piece of software that it’s a wonder even exists. I found 0x0.st recently and it very much falls into this bucket. It’s essentially a simple, no-account, temporary file hosting site where you can just upload a file using a simple HTTP POST and the site will host it for...

The Perfetto UI is a fascinating project to work on because it often faces performance problems which you wouldn’t see in more “normal” webapps. I learn about all sorts of weird web features by reviewing PRs for the UI. Two such features I just learned about: will-change (PR): a hint, to be used sparingly, to tell...

The Perfetto team spent a lot of time earlier this year rewriting our documentation to be more useful for the average developer. We struggled a lot to figure out “what is the best way to structure our documentation”. When reading Examples are the best documentation today, I came across The Documentation System, an...

Discussed on lobste.rs here. I recently stumbled across this post on lobste.rs about a project called traceboot which allows visualizing the Linux boot process using lightweight ftrace events and Perfetto. The author had some commentary about their experience trying to order tracks in Perfetto: Ordering tracks with...