Lalit Maganti
npub1yntaz4v8qc558m9rcuz6tls90ajph99j8e88m5gp78tkwkpa6jws055x97@drss.io
Recent content on Lalit Maganti
Which country voted the best at Eurovision?
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
Don't answer the first question
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
Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
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
syntaqlite: high-fidelity devtools that SQLite deserves
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
Rendering 100k trace events faster with exponential search
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
The surprising attention on sprites, exe.dev, and shellbox
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
Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail
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
One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household
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
Homepage Redesign, Light Mode and More
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
Why I Ignore The Spotlight as a Staff Engineer
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
We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed 189 bugs
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
TIL: Number in man page titles (e.g. sleep(3))
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
When Good Technical Writing Isn't Enough
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
About
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
CAST(x AS STRING) casts to integer in SQLite
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
TIL: Diátaxis: Systematic technical documentation
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
Perfetto: Swiss Army Knife for Linux Client Tracing
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
TIL: Public File Hosting with 0x0.st
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
TIL: `will-change` and `isolation` CSS properties
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
TIL: The Documentation System (Divio)
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
On Perfetto, Open Source, and Company Priorities
17 Oct 2025
*Discussed on [lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs/s/chaivl/on_perfetto_open_source_company).* I recently stumbled across [this post on
What Makes a Good Tool for Claude Code
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
Harnessing Frustration: Using LLMs to Overcome Activation Energy
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
V4L2 and Hardware Encoding on the Raspberry Pi
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