Lalit Maganti

18 Aug 2026

I’ve been using Opus 5 as my main coding for the last few days 1, and I noticed something odd: the code comments stopped using em-dashes; everything is double hyphens (--) now. Instead of going off

17 Aug 2026

PyTorch profiles are going to look much better in the next release of Perfetto. Last time, I explained how PyTorch’s profiler emits events that overlap in ways that are technically forbidden by the

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.

27 Jul 2026

Antirez, the creator of Redis, recently argued that expert programmers using AI should think of themselves as being Linus Torvalds. The key part of his analogy is this: Automatic programming,

25 Jul 2026

“How do you find problems worth working on?” a senior engineer I mentor asked me recently. He’s trying to make the jump to staff engineer and realized that the role isn’t just about doing the

17 Jul 2026

Writing for the world is something which has ebbed and flowed for me over time. I’ve always liked sharing my thoughts, starting with websites all the way back when I was a kid. In times when I

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

2 Jul 2026

We just [released Perfetto v57](https://github.com/google/perfetto/releases/tag/v57.1) and I wanted to share the new things I’m most excited about. This is something I wanted to do for past

30 Jun 2026

[When impressive performance gains do not matter](https://blog.colinbreck.com/when-impressive-performance-gains-do-not-matter/) is a very nice article covering some ways in which going after

17 Jun 2026

Since my [original launch post](https://lalitm.com/post/syntaqlite/) for syntaqlite, I’ve been quietly working away on it in the background. A lot of the work has been fixing correctness bugs which

16 Jun 2026

I came across [Iroh](https://www.iroh.computer/) ([via](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542480), [via](https://lobste.rs/s/cslljn/iroh_1_0_dial_keys_not_ips)) today as it hit 1.0 and found it

7 Jun 2026

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

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

7 Jun 2026

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

17 May 2026

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

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 industry[1](#sn-sqlite-industry), I’ve long been puzzled that no one has

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

3 Feb 2026

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

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](https://sprites.dev) (fly.io) with [508

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

*Discussed on [lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs/s/mxqift/one_number_i_trust_plain_text_accounting) and [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46463407)*. Two people. Eighteen accounts

6 Dec 2025

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

4 Dec 2025

*Discussed on [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46146451), [lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs/s/xdjgbd/why_i_ignore_spotlight_as_staff_engineer) and

22 Nov 2025

*Discussed on [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024541), [lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs/s/gae4dh/we_stopped_roadmap_work_for_week_fixed_189) and

17 Nov 2025

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](https://man7.org) or

12 Nov 2025

Last week, I came across [Don’t Build an Audience](https://www.humaninvariant.com/blog/audience). It’s a fascinating post and has been occupying a lot of my “free thinking” time. I strongly

4 Nov 2025

I’m a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google working on [Perfetto](https://docs.perfetto.dev), an open source suite of tools for performance tracing and analysis. I joined Perfetto as a founding

3 Nov 2025

*Discussed on [lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs/s/tqwmbn/cast_x_as_string_casts_integer_sqlite).* As an “SQLite consultant” for my local area of Google, I often have people come to me having written

2 Nov 2025

A few weeks ago, I [wrote](https://lalitm.com/til-the-documentation-system-divio/) about “The Documentation System” and how valuable I found it. As I dug deeper into researching how best to apply

31 Oct 2025

*Discussed on [lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs/s/6c86lq/perfetto_swiss_army_knife_for_linux) and [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45771019).* I gave a talk at the [2025 Tracing

25 Oct 2025

Sometimes you run into a truly inspirational piece of software that it’s a wonder even exists. I found [0x0.st](https://0x0.st/) recently and it very much falls into this bucket. It’s

23 Oct 2025

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

19 Oct 2025

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

17 Oct 2025

*Discussed on [lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs/s/chaivl/on_perfetto_open_source_company).* I recently stumbled across [this post on

12 Oct 2025

I’ve been using Claude Code extensively for personal projects, and similar AI coding tools at work. Recently I came across [this excellent blog

14 Jul 2025

One of my biggest weaknesses as a software engineer is procrastination when facing a new project. When the scope is unclear, I have a tendency to wait until I feel I’ve “felt out” the problem

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