Lalit Maganti
Lalit Maganti
Lalit Maganti
I’m a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google working on Perfetto, an open source suite of tools for performance tracing and analysis. I’ve joined Perfetto as a founding engineer in 2017 and have been part of the project ever since.
Latest Posts
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. Instead of going off a gut feeling, I decided to actually...
PyTorch profiles are going to look much better in the next release of Perfetto. Last time, I explained how PyTorch’s profiler emits events that overlap in ways that are technically forbidden by the Chrome JSON Trace Event spec. As a...
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 hear more junior engineers ask: “How...
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. Specifically, agents’ ability to jump into new codebases...
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. The decision does not surprise me, and...
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, in the hands of people that are...
“How do you find problems worth working on?” a senior engineer I mentor asked me recently. He’s trying to make the jump to staff engineer and realized that the role isn’t just about doing the work he’s assigned. He also needs to get...
Writing for the world is something which has ebbed and flowed for me over time. I’ve always liked sharing my thoughts, starting with websites all the way back when I was a kid. In times when I sustained it, I had various “blog”-like...
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 much as sneeze. jj, an alternative...
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 something I plan on doing more of going...
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. It resonated a lot with how I think about...
Since my original launch post for syntaqlite, I’ve been quietly working away on it in the background. A lot of the work has been fixing correctness bugs which I discovered as I integrated it into production as the parser for PerfettoSQL...
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 pretty clear that lots of people are...
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been receiving more security bug reports for Perfetto’s trace processor than I ever have before, all of them found by AI. And I’m very happy about it! These are bugs that would almost certainly not have...
Eurovision was on yesterday. I’ve never been interested much in the musical side but the weird political dynamics of Eurovision voting have always fascinated me; I tune in each year just for them and somewhat snarky commentary of Graham...