Moving from a single-host process to a distributed system — July 10, 2019. As Taylor Swift was giving her very first live performance of “You Need To Calm Down” at the New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom, I was nothing but calm. This was being livestreamed to all 200 million Amazon Prime members across the globe. As the concert progressed without a…

So easy to end up living in a bubble — My entire 25+ year career in software engineering has been at three out of the Big Tech companies: Microsoft (11 years), Amazon (11 years) and Google (3.5 years). And I have an embarrassing admission. I lived in bubbles. Initially, I was blissfully unaware I did: it wasn’t deliberate, it was…

How a little problem became a multimillion dollar problem at Google scale — Co-authored with Babu Prasad and Vidhi Gupta I’ve been working at Google for about three and a half years. Back in 2021, we were facing a little problem. A team we were working with had too many duplicate bugs. How did they get in this situation? Well, Google runs automated…

The complexity behind eradicating test flakiness, Part 2 — A couple of weeks ago, I published “When sharks chew on network cables — The complexity behind eradicating test flakiness.” In that article, I explored the common sources of flakiness in Integration Testing. There’s a surprising amount of complexity in the domain, like unreliable dependencies, unreliable network connections, and test…

The complexity behind eradicating test flakiness — For the last 25 years, I’ve been fascinated by engineering productivity at large software companies. I have been a Senior Staff Engineer at Google for 3 years, focusing on Developer Infrastructure for Integration Testing. Prior to that, I worked at Amazon for 11 years, where I was a Principal Engineer…

The backstory of how I started and grew this blog, and what I learned in the process — When I was a kid, I was an avid reader. I’d spend my summers in my grandpa’s cottage by the river, and being a bookworm, my favorite activity was bringing a giant stack of books, and reading them on a hammock between two fragrant guava trees. It was an idyllic…

Are your customers coming to you, or are you coming to your customers? — I’ve been trying to figure out how to articulate a vision that I have for something at work in simple terms, and I finally found (what I think is) a fun way to describe it, in plain English. …

What I learned about humility, perseverance and subtle influence from a shy man that inspired the world — December 19, 2022, 3AM. Aerolíneas Argentinas flight 1915 is slowly approaching Buenos Aires, after crossing the Atlantic. Even at this hour, there are thousands of people anxiously tracking the flight. This is because it carries something precious that has not touched Argentinian soil in 36 years: the FIFA World Cup…

The Big Tech Layoffs of 2022–2023 — Amazon 18,000. Google 12,000. Microsoft 10,000. Meta 11,000. Twitter 6,000. Salesforce, Doordash, Snap, Lyft, Stripe, Redfin, the list continues on and on and on. I’m usually a pretty positive guy, but this week, I have not been feeling it. My apologies in advance for the negative tone, but it’s hard…