Lalit Maganti (Articles only)

I built buildprof (Github), an open-source tracing tool that shows where the time goes when you compile software on Linux.

To get promoted as a software engineer in Big Tech, you generally need to show “ownership” of a product or area.

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.

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.

Note: this post was revised after publishing for increased clarity, based on reader feedback.

Working with lots of changes in parallel on git can be painful.

This post was formerly titled “17 bugs in 10 weeks from AI security scanning”.

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?”

For eight years, I’ve wanted a high-quality set of devtools for working with SQLite.

Most SQL tools treat SQLite as a “flavor” of a generic SQL parser.

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…

When I was a junior engineer, my manager would occasionally confide his frustrations to me in our weekly 1:1s.

Two people.

Lately I’ve been reading Sean Goedecke’s essays on being a Staff+ engineer.

It’s Friday at 4pm.

Last week, I came across Don’t Build an Audience.

I gave a talk at the 2025 Tracing Summit last month titled “Perfetto: The Swiss Army Knife of Linux Client/Embedded Tracing”.

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.

TLDR: Explain how the V4L2 M2M API works through the use-case of implementing hardware video encoding on the Raspberry Pi.