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
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 weird because I love regular work....
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 the numbers in sleep(3) and read(2)...
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 argued. To summarise what it tries to...
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?! Have I hit an SQLite bug?”. I have to...
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 by the same author after they left...
I gave a talk at the 2025 Tracing Summit last month titled “Perfetto: The Swiss Army Knife of Linux Client/Embedded Tracing”. My goal in this talk was to show how Linux kernel, systems and embedded developers can use Perfetto when...
Sometimes you run into a truly inspirational piece of software that it’s a wonder even exists. I found 0x0.st recently and it very much falls into this bucket. It’s essentially a simple, no-account, temporary file hosting site where you...
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. I learn about all sorts of weird web features by reviewing PRs for the UI. Two such features...
The Perfetto team spent a lot of time earlier this year rewriting our documentation to be more useful for the average developer. We struggled a lot to figure out “what is the best way to structure our documentation”. When reading...
Discussed on lobste.rs here. 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. The author had some commentary...
I’ve been using Claude Code extensively for personal projects, and similar AI coding tools at work. Recently I came across this excellent blog post that resonated with a lot of my experience. One part stuck with me though: Noah...
One of my biggest weaknesses as a software engineer is procrastination when facing a new project. When the scope is unclear, I have a tendency to wait until I feel I’ve “felt out” the problem to start doing anything. I know I’ll feel...
TLDR: Explain how the V4L2 M2M API works through the use-case of implementing hardware video encoding on the Raspberry Pi. This knowledge is generally useful as V4L2 is the de-facto generic API for hardware decoding and encoding on...
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....