achals

Happy birthday!!

Some thoughts on building Realtime Compute at Tecton I learned recently that Tecton was getting acquired by Databricks, and with that I also I started to think about the cool work that my team and I worked on that we never got to blog about. Seeing as h...

I finally got around to writing up some stories about what i worked on while at Tecton: blog.achals.com/some-thought...

There's two more parts after this one two.

I worked on a few fairly prominent efforts in open source (Istio, OpenAPI), but I think of all of them, it’s gRPC that I think has the coolest story. Pull up a chair and set for a spell (any inaccuracies in what follows are 100% my fault for having a bad memory!).

It’s so funny to think about the fact that there’s people out there deferring every life decision to this

A giant sphere of flesh in Central Park towering over the city like a big gross meatball. This was made by redditor kiwi2703 to show what it would look like if you combined every human on Earth into a ball, and it’s clearly a bad idea

Within 18 months all white collar workers could be replaced by a 1km sphere of flesh in Central Park

Feels like the premium-feel of macbooks are what make them popular as opposed to the suitability of macOS itself. Which is what makes me worried that it's not really guaranteed that macbooks will continue to be as good for dev work as they have been.

I love writing kotlin, but end up writing go at my current day job. Some questions:

- championing new programming languages is not cheap; what does it take for languages to achieve "success" to have that continued investment?

- have LLMs influence Andreys views on language design going forward?

Message in CTO WhatsApp group: I did a code and architecture review for a company yesterday who had vibe coded their MVP - there were no common classes, modules, functions, etc. every "feature" was a separate file with literally a main method full of all the code required for that one function - no reuse anywhere and loads of bits of code that were declared but never used, variable names that didn't make sense, the same variables defined everywhere, etc. Because they were quite far down this path the tidy-up process is going to be a long and difficult road

From a CTO WhatsApp group I'm in

Excited to share that I’m reviewing talks for the Distributed Data Systems track at Rootconf 2025! 🚀

If you’re working on high-throughput, low-latency systems — — we want to hear what you’ve been building.

📅 16–17 May, Bangalore
🎤 CFP: hasgeek.com/rootconf/roo...

@hasgeek.com

The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism A few months ago, Casey Newton of Platformer ran a piece called "The phony comforts of AI skepticism," framing those who would criticize generative AI as "having fun," damning them as "hyper-fixated o...

Newsletter: The tech media needs to move away from optimism and dreaming about what AI (and AGI) can do, and start focusing on the dangerous financial crises brewing. Failing to hold the powerful accountable is cowardice, and actively harmful to society.
www.wheresyoured.at/optimistic-cowardice/

Intel Appoints Lip-Bu Tan as Chief Executive Officer Tan to join Intel board of directors.

@bcantrill.bsky.social i assume you've seen this already? newsroom.intel.com/corporate/in...

a sign that says " what is even happening " next to a dumpster Alt: a sign that says " what is even happening " next to a dumpster fire floating down a river

I was booking a flight for my family + parents + siblings when the Alaska Airlines ate and lost all the passenger details for 7 people as well as the flights in my cart. And flight search is now broken. This is fine.

8 Essential Qualities of Successful Leaders Becoming a great leader is a journey of continuous learning and growth. It’s a process — one that thrives on embracing challenges, seeking feedback, fostering connections, and cultivating understandin...

Nice reminder of what attributes to demonstrate and grow as a leader

hbr.org/2023/12/8-es...

Ghost: The best open source blog & newsletter platform Beautiful, modern publishing with email newsletters and paid subscriptions built-in. Used by Platformer, 404Media, Lever News, Tangle, The Browser, and thousands more.

I've heard good things about ghost.org which it's what I'm planning on moving to

Home DeepLearning.AI | Andrew Ng | Join over 7 million people learning how to use and build AI through our online courses. Earn certifications, level up your skills, and stay ahead of the industry.

I did some courses on deeplearning.ai and coursera.com. Also, I messed around with rust + the RESP protocol: github.com/achals/redis...

Technology and Grieving In Loving Memory of Samaya June Roy-Yang: 12/13/2016 to 11/18/2023

I don't think I've read anything as gut wrenching as this

www.readmargins.com/p/technology...

@seattleaquarium.bsky.social is a magical place

a man with long hair and a beard is holding a glass with the word huh written on it ALT: a man with long hair and a beard is holding a glass with the word huh written on it

Sleep?

I was trying to test a service using ghz.sh and i guess I'm going up have to pass around compiled protosets instead, weeee

grpc-python's reflection doesn't work for "method" describe · Issue #34743 · grpc/grpc What version of gRPC and what language are you using? grpcio 1.59.0 grpcio-reflection 1.59.0 (This has happened from 1.47.0 as I tried) What operating system (Linux, Windows,...) and version? Linux...

TIL that the server reflection API for grpc in python is broken because it can't describe service methods (github.com/grpc/grpc/is...) 😭

I'm excited there are more and more techie folks landing here 🦋

Tell your friends! Why are they still on X?

ICYMI, there are a few good starter packs, which I'll share below 👇

Rootconf Mini 2024 Geeking out on systems and security since 2012

Hey folks, catch me at the Rootconf Mini 2024 conference on Nov 22nd, sharing Tecton’s journey of rebuilding our real-time compute stack.

This is a deep dive into architectural decisions, and how we shaped Tecton’s ability to deliver a better product experience.

hasgeek.com/rootconf/2024/

I see a matklad post I re-post it:

matklad.github.io/2024/10/06/o...

#rustlang

Staring down a few weeks off work. Anyone have any suggestions for projects? I’ve been meaning to do something in the ML infra or personal productivity space and pick up rust/typescript/zig in the process

Comedian John Mulaney roasts SF techies at Dreamforce "Let me get this straight," he said. "You're hosting a 'future of AI' event in a city that has failed humanity so miserably?"

I’m not the biggest John Mulaney fan but fuck yes.

sfstandard.com/2024/09/19/c...

These are just a few of my favorite images I captured from this storm of a lifetime. Ridiculous structure, prolific lightning, and a sky full of stars. It doesn't get much better. What a planet we live on.

Finally catching up with Joe Bob's Nightmareathon, and rewatching When Evil Lurks. Such a fantastic and effective movie - just the poster dredged up a bunch of images from the first time I saw it.