Sign in

Akshay Shah

@akshayshah.org
160 followers 356 following 147 posts

All-purpose starter-upper @ Antithesis Infra eng, ex-{Uber, MSFT, founder} akshayshah.org

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Akshay Shah
Brad Fitzpatrick @bradfitz.com · 13/08/2026
On 2024-02-22 I reached out to @antithesis.com fanboying and wanting to use it for @tailscale.com. They were expensive & I couldn’t get people on board w/ buying their service. Instead, more time + money went to: tailscale.com/blog/sqlite-... Nerd sniped them and: antithesis.com/blog/2026/wa... 😅
antithesis.com
Breaking the WAL | Antithesis
I did this from a lawn chair on the Sunshine Coast.
4537
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 21/07/2026
Papers We Love is back this Thursday in downtown SF! I'm presenting "Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures," an empirical evaluation of real distributed systems bugs with surprising conclusions. Come for the banh mi and drinks, stay for the conversation. luma.com/zorjnr9f
010
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 19/04/2026
I'd be so much more aggressive with AI for my email if Google didn't couple creating drafts and sending them into one "gmail.compose" OAuth scope. Some PM in Google Apps must be desperately searching for an AI project before the next promo season - be the hero we all need!
010
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 24/03/2026
Straight 90s vibes for me today: editing today's mega-doc in the Terminus font, lots of Eve, Nas, Dre, and Outkast in the playlist, and a too-large AWK script on the side.
020
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 16/02/2026
Nothing like running face-first into a sentence including “prebendaries enfeoffed in kind or in money” to emphasize how long it’s been since I’ve read something fancy.
100
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 15/02/2026
Don't miss Papers We Love Too this week! On Thursday (Feb 19), join us in downtown SF to hear Marco Primi present "Paxos Made Simple" - the most famous algorithm in distributed systems. RSVP on Meetup (www.meetup.com/papers-we-lo...) or just DM me your full name and email.
000
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 11/02/2026
@paperswelove.org is back: on Feb 19, join us in downtown SF to read "Paxos Made Simple" with Marco Primi! We'll have banh mi, drinks, good papers, and good conversation. RSVP on Meetup (www.meetup.com/papers-we-lo...) or just DM me your full name and email.
053
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 03/02/2026
Ain’t no city like my city.
The Golden Gate Bridge, viewed from the Presidio.The Palace of Fine Arts with a full moon overhead.
000
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 13/01/2026
After a few quiet, online-only years, @paperswelove.org is back in San Francisco! Our first in-person meetup is next Thu, Jan 22: @shadaj.me on "Perceus: Garbage Free Reference Counting with Reuse" and me on "Epidemic Algorithms for Replicated Database Maintenance."
111
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 03/01/2026
Come reboot Papers We Love in San Francisco! Shadaj Laddad and I will be kicking things off on Jan 22 with papers on garbage collection and gossip protocols.
032
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 17/11/2025
Property-based testing's roots in academia and functional programming give it a bad rap. It's easy to get started, and it's a really high-octane investment for most projects.
040
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 13/11/2025
Internally, AWS implements consensus as a platform primitive, which eventually evolved into a distributed, strongly consistent, transactional journal. It backs Kinesis, DynamoDB streams, & Aurora DSQL. I'm really surprised that there isn't a battle-tested OSS version.
210
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 06/11/2025
Baffling how the same people can be enraged by 5m builds and enthralled by multi-day async decision-making processes.
020
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 28/10/2025
Just in time for my recent re-obsession with gossip-based systems: Fly.io published a blog post on moving from multi-region Consul to Corrosion, their in-house, SWIM-based metadata store. fly.io/blog/corrosi...
fly.io
Corrosion
Corrosion is distributed service discovery based on Rust, SQLite, and CRDTs.
130
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 26/10/2025
For everything today's models are bad at, I'm really happy with how the images in this presentation came out. Starting with our designer's Halloween images and a pic of myself, then riffing from there was fun! The model feels like an in-betweener in the hand-drawn cartoon days.
010
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 25/10/2025
🧵 OK, so I just read Google's "Firefly: Scalable, Ultra-Accurate Clock Synchronization for Datacenters." Lots of cool ideas. But how do people *monitor* decentralized systems like this?
100
Reposted by Akshay Shah
shikhar @schmizz.net · 23/10/2025
she is @antithesis.com
361
Reposted by Akshay Shah
Antithesis @antithesis.com · 15/10/2025
New mascot day! Here's @akshayshah.org introducing our new mascot to a packed audience at @leaddev.com NYC. We're very sorry about what happened to the old mascot.
001
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 14/10/2025
"Popularized in Haskell" Denominators can really do a lot of work.
020
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 13/10/2025
In honor of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand. “Fifty-two bit mantissa.”
010
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 03/10/2025
Datadog must have been polishing this piece of ragebait for years. It's art, really. (But seriously, this API is like a cheese grater to the face.)
000
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 03/10/2025
Vibe-writing in Excel? No thanks 🤮 Unreliable tools can be incredibly useful - but you need a bulletproof test for their output. And spreadsheets are famously hard to get right! 94% of operational spreadsheets contain errors, and humans are exceptionally bad at catching them.
100
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 02/10/2025
Best convo on the internet right now @vicvijayakumar.com
010
Reposted by Akshay Shah
Cynthia Dunlop @cynthiadunlop.bsky.social · 02/10/2025
How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs // Stanislav Kozlovski Obscure feature + obscure feature + obscure feature = bug // Michael Gibson, @antithesis.com %CPU utilization is a lie // @brendanlong.bsky.social
111
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 01/10/2025
This is *so* clever! At least in my head, this rhymes with the MapReduce philosophy of moving compute to the data.
100
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 29/09/2025
I’d rather write statsd to the wire by hand than descend into the Lovecraftian horror of the OTel Go docs.
000
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 28/09/2025
Unexpected benefit of saving PDFs of all the papers and @oreilly.bsky.social books I’ve read over the years: I have the most awesome NotebookLM session for distributed systems.
030
Reposted by Akshay Shah
The New Stack @thenewstack.io · 28/09/2025
Find out why AI code gen delivers only partial wins today. Join us on Oct 9 for a live webinar with @antithesis.com's Will Wilson & @akshayshah.org. They'll share how to bridge the gap between AI generation and real engineering productivity. Don't miss it ➡️ bit.ly/Antithesis-A...
001
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 28/09/2025
HBR is usually hot garbage, but you gotta respect whoever came up with “workslop” 💯 hbr.org/2025/09/ai-g...
hbr.org
AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
Despite a surge in generative AI use across workplaces, most companies are seeing little measurable ROI. One possible reason is because AI tools are being used to produce “workslop”—content that appea...
000
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 25/09/2025
“Antithesis’s deterministic simulation and active exploration remove the blindfold, enabling a systematic and reproducible search for bugs.” - Marek Siarkowicz, Kubernetes maintainer www.cncf.io/blog/2025/09...
cncf.io
Autonomous Testing of etcd’s Robustness
As a critical component of many production systems, including Kubernetes, the etcd project’s first priority is reliability. Ensuring consistency and data safety requires our project contributors to…
000
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 24/09/2025
Shmargaret Shmitchell, indeed.
000
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 19/09/2025
Has anyone figured out how to get Claude to fix real bugs in distributed DBs? Hitting a brick wall with etcd and the long-abandoned Redis-Raft.
000
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 19/09/2025
Excited to talk agents, AI, and enduring quality with Will and TNS.
010
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 15/09/2025
So glad that testing/synctest is available without feature flags in Go 1.25! 🫡 To whichever Parse engineer originally wrote facebookgo/clock: you (and the many, many forks over the years) are finally off the hook. Thanks for paving the way.
020
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 10/09/2025
Chroma has drawn some interesting conclusions applying property-based testing to LLMs: research.trychroma.com/generative-b... (h/t Hammad Bashir, who’s presenting this live at Chroma HQ!)
research.trychroma.com
Generative Benchmarking
000
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 06/09/2025
LLMs are remarkably effective at showing us - through our own automation choices! - which internal processes are just scar tissue that nobody cares about anymore.
010
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 04/09/2025
Somehow I missed the news that EKS has also migrated off standard etcd. GKE is using Spanner. Is Azure still using OSS etcd? aws.amazon.com/blogs/contai...
aws.amazon.com
Under the hood: Amazon EKS ultra scale clusters | Amazon Web Services
This post was co-authored by Shyam Jeedigunta, Principal Engineer, Amazon EKS; Apoorva Kulkarni, Sr. Specialist Solutions Architect, Containers and Raghav Tripathi, Sr. Software Dev Manager, Amazon EK...
000
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 01/09/2025
I wonder what Roy Fielding's take on LLMs is - there's finally a way for computers to autonomously drive RESTful APIs.
100
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 28/08/2025
Bemused by the enthusiastic embrace of JSON-RPC by the LLM tools ecosystem.
011
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 13/08/2025
“The past few decades have seen almost unimaginable advances in compute performance and efficiency” My dude it’s only been 80 years since ENIAC. venturebeat.com/ai/why-the-a...
venturebeat.com
Why the AI era is forcing a redesign of the entire compute backbone
Why fulfilling the promise of AI requires a step-change in capabilities far exceeding the advancements of the internet era.
020
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 11/08/2025
Finally accepting that I have to migrate my nvim config to Lua - I don't *want* to be vi-dependent, but I'm too far down this road to change now. The worst part is that the most critical nvim behavior is some cursed vimscript I wrote forever ago and barely understand now.
310
Reposted by Akshay Shah
Pierre Zemb @pierrezemb.fr · 11/08/2025
✍️ I wrote a new blogpost about two podcast episodes I find particularly interesting — spoiler: they’re from @oxide.computer 🖥️ and @antithesis.com 🧪 🔗 pierrezemb.fr/posts/debugg...
pierrezemb.fr
Two Podcast Episodes on Topics Developers Rarely Talk About
Two podcast episodes—one from Oxide and one from Antithesis—on debugging at the limits and building correctness into systems from day one.
092
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 11/08/2025
If you're into databases and you're in Seattle, @marcbrooker.bsky.social is talking at Seattle Systems on Aug 21: lu.ma/umtmqb38
lu.ma
Transactions and Coordination in Aurora DSQL · Luma
Join us for a Seattle Systems talk that’s definitely worth your time as we welcome Marc Brooker, Distinguished Engineer at AWS, for a deep dive into the inner…
031
Reposted by Akshay Shah
Phil Eaton @eatonphil.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
EDB Engineering Newsletter #9 is now out! This time we're featuring posts on Postgres, distributed systems, benchmarking, AI, and performance engineering from Gunnar Morling, Antithesis/Jepsen, Justin Jaffray, Anthropic, Brendan Gregg, Simon Willison and more. edbeng.substack.com/p/edb-engine...
0142
Reposted by Akshay Shah
Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
Recording for those who missed the talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdg3...
youtube.com
ChatGPT Ain’t Got $%@& On Me! The Future of Automated Database Tuning
YouTube video by South Bay Systems
0104
Reposted by Akshay Shah
Marc Brooker @marcbrooker.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
I had a great time talking to Ben and Will from Antithesis on the BugBash podcast about software testing and validation at AWS. In this wide-ranging hour we talk deterministic simulation testing, fuzzing, formal methods, the history and future of testing, and much more.
151
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 06/08/2025
Ever wonder where deterministic simulation testing came from? On Episode 2 of the Bug Bash podcast, hear @marcbrooker.bsky.social talk to Will and Ben about how AWS achieves their legendary reliability. youtu.be/UGdMf7tC25Y open.spotify.com/show/5GtS7mZjc… podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the���
youtu.be
Scaling Correctness: Marc Brooker on a Decade of Formal Methods at AWS
YouTube video by Antithesis
010
Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 29/07/2025
This release bundles an MCP server into gopls!
110