We’re excited to share Perfetto v58.2! This release makes it possible to merge traces from different machines onto one timeline, introduces Memscope and Memory Overview for end-to-end memory invest...

To get promoted as a software engineer in Big Tech, you generally need to show “ownership” of a product or area. This means being responsible for it and deciding what should happen over time. I often ...

AI makes devtools cheap to customize, but personalized forks still demand ongoing attention and ownership.

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. Th...

SDKs and CLI for Codex Security. Contribute to openai/codex-security development by creating an account on GitHub.

Agent development means after-the-fact CI no longer works.

Antirez, the creator of Redis, recently argued that expert programmers using AI should think of themselves as being Linus Torvalds. The key part of his analogy is this: Automatic programming, instead,...

How listening broadly turns everyday problems into useful project ideas.

Working with lots of changes in parallel on git can be painful. You end up juggling branches and commits, and running scary rebase -i commands that can leave your tree in a half-broken state if you so...

We just released Perfetto v57 and I wanted to share the new things I’m most excited about. This is something I wanted to do for past releases but I just never quite got round to it. It’s also somethin...

We're excited to share Perfetto v57.1! This release introduces an installable AI skill that teaches coding agents how to use Perfetto, a long-awaited fix for overlapping events in JSON traces (PyTo...

Even order-of-magnitude improvements in performance may not matter.

Shell file support: syntaqlite now understands SQLite shell scripts: files that mix .dot commands with SQL. The embedded SQL is extracted and the surrounding shell syntax is ignored, so ast, fmt, ...

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. Judging from the comment sections, it seems pr...

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 easy way...

For eight years, I’ve wanted a high-quality set of devtools for working with SQLite. Given how important SQLite is to the industry1, I’ve long been puzzled that no one has invested in building a reall...

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 tables, miss syntax like UPSERT, and ...

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 you’re ...

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 ...

Two people. Eighteen accounts spanning checking, savings, credit cards, investments. Three currencies. Twenty minutes of work every week. One net worth number I actually trust. The payoff: A single, t...

Lately I’ve been reading Sean Goedecke’s essays on being a Staff+ engineer. His work (particularly Software engineering under the spotlight and It’s Not Your Codebase) is razor-sharp and feels painful...

It’s Friday at 4pm. I’ve just closed my 12th bug of the week. My brain is completely fried. And I’m staring at the bug leaderboard, genuinely sad that Monday means going back to regular work. Which is...

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. I’ve always seen t...

A response to "Don't Build an Audience"

Last week, I came across Don’t Build an Audience. It’s a fascinating post and has been occupying a lot of my “free thinking” time. I strongly suggest reading it as it’s well written and excellently ar...

Plus TIL: Diátaxis: Systematic technical documentation

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?! Hav...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about “The Documentation System” and how valuable I found it. As I dug deeper into researching how best to apply the principles outlined there, I came across Diátaxis. Written...