Lalit Maganti (Articles only)

12 Sep 2026

I built buildprof (Github), an open-source tracing tool that shows where the time goes when you compile software on Linux. Here’s a realtime video of it profiling a clean build of ripgrep: Watch

15 Aug 2026

To get promoted as a software engineer in Big Tech, you generally need to show “ownership” of a product or area. This means being responsible for it and deciding what should happen over time. I

9 Aug 2026

In Devtools must be open source1 (via), David Crawshaw makes the case that, because of coding agents, we’re now in an era where devtools will be personalized by individual users. Specifically,

1 Aug 2026

Codeberg, a Git code hosting platform, recently took a decision to prohibit projects that mostly consist of generative-AI-written code which has prompted concern and extensive discussion elsewhere.

25 Jul 2026

Note: this post was revised after publishing for increased clarity, based on reader feedback. “How do you find problems worth working on?” a senior engineer I mentor asked me recently. He’s

13 Jul 2026

Working with lots of changes in parallel on git can be painful. You end up juggling branches and commits, and running scary rebase -i commands that can leave your tree in a half-broken state if you

7 Jun 2026

This post was formerly titled “17 bugs in 10 weeks from AI security scanning”. It was changed upon feedback from trusted readers who suggested, while accurate, it did not give a good sense of

16 May 2026

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

5 Apr 2026

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

17 Mar 2026

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,

29 Jan 2026

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

13 Jan 2026

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

1 Jan 2026

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,

4 Dec 2025

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

22 Nov 2025

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.

12 Nov 2025

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

31 Oct 2025

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

17 Oct 2025

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

1 Feb 2021

TLDR: Explain how the V4L2 M2M API works through the use-case of implementing hardware video encoding on the Raspberry Pi. This knowledge is generally useful as V4L2 is the de-facto generic API for