Lalit Maganti

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.

PyTorch profiles are going to look much better in the next release of Perfetto.

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.

Antirez, the creator of Redis, recently argued that expert programmers using AI should think of themselves as being Linus Torvalds.

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

Writing for the world is something which has ebbed and flowed for me over time.

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

We just released Perfetto v57 and I wanted to share the new things I’m most excited about.

When impressive performance gains do not matter is a very nice article covering some ways in which going after performance alone is not sufficient without considering the wider picture.

Since my original launch post for syntaqlite, I’ve been quietly working away on it in the background.

I came across Iroh (via, via) today as it hit 1.0 and found it a really interesting solution to a problem I knew existed but had not thought a lot about.

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

Eurovision was on yesterday.

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.

We’ve recently been looking into optimizing rendering performance of the Perfetto UI on large traces.

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.

Just a quick note documenting some recent changes to the blog.

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

It’s Friday at 4pm.

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.

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

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?!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about “The Documentation System” and how valuable I found it.

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

Sometimes you run into a truly inspirational piece of software that it’s a wonder even exists.

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.

The Perfetto team spent a lot of time earlier this year rewriting our documentation to be more useful for the average developer.

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.

I’ve been using Claude Code extensively for personal projects, and similar AI coding tools at work.

One of my biggest weaknesses as a software engineer is procrastination when facing a new project.

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