Akshay Shah
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akshayshah.org
Akshay Shah
@akshayshah.org
Field CTO @ Antithesis
https://akshayshah.org
Are premium, low-volume brands (Riese & Muller, Stromer, etc.) more financially viable?
November 10, 2025 at 10:23 PM
Mostly motivated by Google’s decision to have proto3 drop support for features that their own internal systems depend on, plus some optimizations for C++ gencode. More context: buf.build/blog/protobu...
Protobuf Editions are here: don’t panic
Most Protobuf users should ignore Editions and continue using proto3. If you become an early adopter, we’ve been working closely with Google to ensure that Buf will support editions as soon as they’re...
buf.build
November 6, 2025 at 11:27 PM
I'm still wondering what the observability best practices are for gossip-based systems. In my experience, observability is especially frustrating when the system is misbehaving and nodes have different views of the world.
October 28, 2025 at 12:13 AM
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.
October 28, 2025 at 12:13 AM
Gmail could crush this if it:

- Delivered to other ppl within the company instantly
- Displayed intra-company threads like iMessage by default - until some buzzkill sends more than a few sentences

Google has tried 9 zillion chat apps but AFAIK hasn’t let Gmail evolve. (RIP Inbox.)
October 25, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Wow, that’s…impressive dedication. Feels like a massive miss for the platform that workflows like this are necessary though.
October 25, 2025 at 6:21 PM
Slack’s default behavior of equating “I’ve seen this” with “I’m done with this, pls consign it to the void” is maddening as soon as anything serious gets discussed.
October 25, 2025 at 7:49 AM
The only decentralized system like this I've ever operated was an operational nightmare. During outages, each node had a different view of the cluster. Reassembling some global notion of cluster state took obscene observability spend.
October 25, 2025 at 6:34 AM
Link to the paper: dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
dl.acm.org
October 25, 2025 at 6:34 AM
We have Hurd your complaints and are working on a free upgrade.
October 24, 2025 at 3:35 AM
Who wants research, but just this flimsy, half-hallucinated facsimile of it? Feels like a parlor trick that’s captured the imaginations of the people who only listen to 5-minute summaries of business bestsellers.
October 23, 2025 at 6:48 PM
Beyla/OBI?
October 13, 2025 at 3:29 PM
My recollection is that the catchphrase was “move the code to the data,” which seems borne out by Section 3.4 (“Locality”) of Google’s MR paper. I think Hadoop also tried to schedule mappers onto nodes with the relevant data, but I could be wrong - you’d certainly know.
October 5, 2025 at 10:54 PM
Budweiser 😂
October 3, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Inspired by a fascinating talk with @drmaciver.bsky.social this morning. For more on building reliable tools on unreliable foundations, stay tuned to the Bug Bash podcast from @antithesis.com.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGdM...
Scaling Correctness: Marc Brooker on a Decade of Formal Methods at AWS
How do you prove the correctness of services that underpin a huge portion of the internet? At the scale of Amazon Web Services, traditional testing falls short. In this episode, we talk with Marc…
www.youtube.com
October 3, 2025 at 2:12 AM
Vibe-writing: www.theverge.com/news/787076/...

Spreadsheet error rates (admittedly sketchy primary sources): faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/images/uploa...
Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word
Vibe working is all about Office’s new Agent Mode.
www.theverge.com
October 3, 2025 at 2:12 AM