iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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 · 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 · 13/11/2025

The 2014 re:Invent talk from Al Vermeulen and Swami Sivasubramaniam that sparked all this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVvF...

000

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 13/11/2025

And don't even start with Kafka. It's a much higher-level component, the transaction model is painfully under-documented (but kudos to Jack Vanlightly for improving the situation!), and the implementation was fatally flawed until at least Kafka 4.0. issues.apache.org/jira/browse/...

100

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 28/10/2025

There's also a nice shout-out for @antithesis.com! I'm biased, but I think it's pretty sweet and you should check it out for your next commercially-important distributed system.

100

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 · 14/10/2025

"Popularized in Haskell" Denominators can really do a lot of work.

020

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.

210

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 02/10/2025

Best convo on the internet right now @vicvijayakumar.com

010

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 29/09/2025

Poor Joe. I knew him before his radical sourdough ways.

010

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 22/12/2024

I used to be a die-hard Inbox Zero fan, but I don't think I've seen this screen in at least a year. (I snoozed liberally to get here.) Being on top of every last thing feels less important as the years go by.

000

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 04/12/2024

I’ll never understand how people can just throw dry ice away. I can’t resist playing with it…for science, obviously.

030

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 25/11/2024

Guess there’s no risk of this @db.cs.cmu.edu seminar being boring 😂

010