Akshay Shah
@akshayshah.org
📤 147
📥 356
📝 144
Field CTO @ Antithesis Infra eng, ex-{Uber, MSFT, founder}
https://akshayshah.org
reposted by
Akshay Shah
rain 🌦️
10 days ago
Ported over some high-value property-based tests from proptest to Hegel by
@drmaciver.bsky.social
, Liam DeVoe, and the folks at
@antithesis.com
; loved it! They publish a Claude skill which worked fantastically well for these tests.
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Notes on porting buf-list's tests from proptest to hegel · Issue #148 · hegeldev/hegel-rust
Hi! As promised on Hacker News I've ported over some data-dependent tests in my buf-list crate from proptest to hegel. Wanted to provide an experience report -- not sure where else to put it. Backg...
https://github.com/hegeldev/hegel-rust/issues/148
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Straight 90s vibes for me today: editing today's mega-doc in the Terminus font, lots of Eve, Nas, Dre, and Outkast in the playlist, and a too-large AWK script on the side.
14 days ago
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Nothing like running face-first into a sentence including “prebendaries enfeoffed in kind or in money” to emphasize how long it’s been since I’ve read something fancy.
about 2 months ago
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Don't miss Papers We Love Too this week! On Thursday (Feb 19), join us in downtown SF to hear Marco Primi present "Paxos Made Simple" - the most famous algorithm in distributed systems. RSVP on Meetup (
www.meetup.com/papers-we-lo...
) or just DM me your full name and email.
about 2 months ago
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@paperswelove.org
is back: on Feb 19, join us in downtown SF to read "Paxos Made Simple" with Marco Primi! We'll have banh mi, drinks, good papers, and good conversation. RSVP on Meetup (
www.meetup.com/papers-we-lo...
) or just DM me your full name and email.
about 2 months ago
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Ain’t no city like my city.
2 months ago
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After a few quiet, online-only years,
@paperswelove.org
is back in San Francisco! Our first in-person meetup is next Thu, Jan 22:
@shadaj.me
on "Perceus: Garbage Free Reference Counting with Reuse" and me on "Epidemic Algorithms for Replicated Database Maintenance."
3 months ago
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Come reboot Papers We Love in San Francisco! Shadaj Laddad and I will be kicking things off on Jan 22 with papers on garbage collection and gossip protocols.
add a skeleton here at some point
3 months ago
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Property-based testing's roots in academia and functional programming give it a bad rap. It's easy to get started, and it's a really high-octane investment for most projects.
add a skeleton here at some point
5 months ago
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Internally, AWS implements consensus as a platform primitive, which eventually evolved into a distributed, strongly consistent, transactional journal. It backs Kinesis, DynamoDB streams, & Aurora DSQL. I'm really surprised that there isn't a battle-tested OSS version.
5 months ago
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Baffling how the same people can be enraged by 5m builds and enthralled by multi-day async decision-making processes.
5 months ago
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Just in time for my recent re-obsession with gossip-based systems:
Fly.io
published a blog post on moving from multi-region Consul to Corrosion, their in-house, SWIM-based metadata store.
fly.io/blog/corrosi...
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Corrosion
Corrosion is distributed service discovery based on Rust, SQLite, and CRDTs.
https://fly.io/blog/corrosion/
5 months ago
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For everything today's models are bad at, I'm really happy with how the images in this presentation came out. Starting with our designer's Halloween images and a pic of myself, then riffing from there was fun! The model feels like an in-betweener in the hand-drawn cartoon days.
5 months ago
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đź§µ OK, so I just read Google's "Firefly: Scalable, Ultra-Accurate Clock Synchronization for Datacenters." Lots of cool ideas. But how do people *monitor* decentralized systems like this?
6 months ago
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reposted by
Akshay Shah
shikhar
6 months ago
she is
@antithesis.com
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reposted by
Akshay Shah
Antithesis
6 months ago
New mascot day! Here's
@akshayshah.org
introducing our new mascot to a packed audience at
@leaddev.com
NYC. We're very sorry about what happened to the old mascot.
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"Popularized in Haskell" Denominators can really do a lot of work.
6 months ago
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In honor of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand. “Fifty-two bit mantissa.”
add a skeleton here at some point
6 months ago
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Datadog must have been polishing this piece of ragebait for years. It's art, really. (But seriously, this API is like a cheese grater to the face.)
6 months ago
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Vibe-writing in Excel? No thanks 🤮 Unreliable tools can be incredibly useful - but you need a bulletproof test for their output. And spreadsheets are famously hard to get right! 94% of operational spreadsheets contain errors, and humans are exceptionally bad at catching them.
6 months ago
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Best convo on the internet right now
@vicvijayakumar.com
6 months ago
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reposted by
Akshay Shah
Cynthia Dunlop
6 months ago
How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs // Stanislav Kozlovski Obscure feature + obscure feature + obscure feature = bug // Michael Gibson,
@antithesis.com
%CPU utilization is a lie //
@brendanlong.bsky.social
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This is *so* clever! At least in my head, this rhymes with the MapReduce philosophy of moving compute to the data.
add a skeleton here at some point
6 months ago
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I’d rather write statsd to the wire by hand than descend into the Lovecraftian horror of the OTel Go docs.
6 months ago
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Unexpected benefit of saving PDFs of all the papers and
@oreilly.bsky.social
books I’ve read over the years: I have the most awesome NotebookLM session for distributed systems.
6 months ago
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reposted by
Akshay Shah
The New Stack
6 months ago
Find out why AI code gen delivers only partial wins today. Join us on Oct 9 for a live webinar with
@antithesis.com
's Will Wilson &
@akshayshah.org
. They'll share how to bridge the gap between AI generation and real engineering productivity. Don't miss it ➡️
bit.ly/Antithesis-A...
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HBR is usually hot garbage, but you gotta respect whoever came up with “workslop” 💯
hbr.org/2025/09/ai-g...
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AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
Despite a surge in generative AI use across workplaces, most companies are seeing little measurable ROI. One possible reason is because AI tools are being used to produce “workslop”—content that appea...
https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity
6 months ago
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“Antithesis’s deterministic simulation and active exploration remove the blindfold, enabling a systematic and reproducible search for bugs.” - Marek Siarkowicz, Kubernetes maintainer
www.cncf.io/blog/2025/09...
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Autonomous Testing of etcd’s Robustness
As a critical component of many production systems, including Kubernetes, the etcd project’s first priority is reliability. Ensuring consistency and data safety requires our project contributors to…
https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/09/25/autonomous-testing-of-etcds-robustness/
6 months ago
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Shmargaret Shmitchell, indeed.
7 months ago
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Has anyone figured out how to get Claude to fix real bugs in distributed DBs? Hitting a brick wall with etcd and the long-abandoned Redis-Raft.
7 months ago
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Excited to talk agents, AI, and enduring quality with Will and TNS.
add a skeleton here at some point
7 months ago
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So glad that testing/synctest is available without feature flags in Go 1.25! 🫡 To whichever Parse engineer originally wrote facebookgo/clock: you (and the many, many forks over the years) are finally off the hook. Thanks for paving the way.
7 months ago
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Chroma has drawn some interesting conclusions applying property-based testing to LLMs:
research.trychroma.com/generative-b...
(h/t Hammad Bashir, who’s presenting this live at Chroma HQ!)
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Generative Benchmarking
https://research.trychroma.com/generative-benchmarking
7 months ago
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LLMs are remarkably effective at showing us - through our own automation choices! - which internal processes are just scar tissue that nobody cares about anymore.
7 months ago
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Somehow I missed the news that EKS has also migrated off standard etcd. GKE is using Spanner. Is Azure still using OSS etcd?
aws.amazon.com/blogs/contai...
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Under the hood: Amazon EKS ultra scale clusters | Amazon Web Services
This post was co-authored by Shyam Jeedigunta, Principal Engineer, Amazon EKS; Apoorva Kulkarni, Sr. Specialist Solutions Architect, Containers and Raghav Tripathi, Sr. Software Dev Manager, Amazon EK...
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/under-the-hood-amazon-eks-ultra-scale-clusters/
7 months ago
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I wonder what Roy Fielding's take on LLMs is - there's finally a way for computers to autonomously drive RESTful APIs.
7 months ago
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Bemused by the enthusiastic embrace of JSON-RPC by the LLM tools ecosystem.
7 months ago
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“The past few decades have seen almost unimaginable advances in compute performance and efficiency” My dude it’s only been 80 years since ENIAC.
venturebeat.com/ai/why-the-a...
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Why the AI era is forcing a redesign of the entire compute backbone
Why fulfilling the promise of AI requires a step-change in capabilities far exceeding the advancements of the internet era.
https://venturebeat.com/ai/why-the-ai-era-is-forcing-a-redesign-of-the-entire-compute-backbone/
8 months ago
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Finally accepting that I have to migrate my nvim config to Lua - I don't *want* to be vi-dependent, but I'm too far down this road to change now. The worst part is that the most critical nvim behavior is some cursed vimscript I wrote forever ago and barely understand now.
8 months ago
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reposted by
Akshay Shah
Pierre Zemb
8 months ago
✍️ I wrote a new blogpost about two podcast episodes I find particularly interesting — spoiler: they’re from
@oxide.computer
🖥️ and
@antithesis.com
đź§Ş đź”—
pierrezemb.fr/posts/debugg...
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Two Podcast Episodes on Topics Developers Rarely Talk About
Two podcast episodes—one from Oxide and one from Antithesis—on debugging at the limits and building correctness into systems from day one.
https://pierrezemb.fr/posts/debugging-and-correctness-podcasts/
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If you're into databases and you're in Seattle,
@marcbrooker.bsky.social
is talking at Seattle Systems on Aug 21:
lu.ma/umtmqb38
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Transactions and Coordination in Aurora DSQL · Luma
Join us for a Seattle Systems talk that’s definitely worth your time as we welcome Marc Brooker, Distinguished Engineer at AWS, for a deep dive into the inner…
https://lu.ma/umtmqb38
8 months ago
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reposted by
Akshay Shah
Phil Eaton
8 months ago
EDB Engineering Newsletter #9 is now out! This time we're featuring posts on Postgres, distributed systems, benchmarking, AI, and performance engineering from Gunnar Morling, Antithesis/Jepsen, Justin Jaffray, Anthropic, Brendan Gregg, Simon Willison and more.
edbeng.substack.com/p/edb-engine...
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reposted by
Akshay Shah
Alex Miller
8 months ago
Recording for those who missed the talk:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdg3...
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ChatGPT Ain’t Got $%@& On Me! The Future of Automated Database Tuning
YouTube video by South Bay Systems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdg310sivqI
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reposted by
Akshay Shah
Marc Brooker
8 months ago
I had a great time talking to Ben and Will from Antithesis on the BugBash podcast about software testing and validation at AWS. In this wide-ranging hour we talk deterministic simulation testing, fuzzing, formal methods, the history and future of testing, and much more.
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Ever wonder where deterministic simulation testing came from? On Episode 2 of the Bug Bash podcast, hear
@marcbrooker.bsky.social
talk to Will and Ben about how AWS achieves their legendary reliability.
youtu.be/UGdMf7tC25Y
open.spotify.com/show/5GtS7mZjc…
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/theďż˝
��
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Scaling Correctness: Marc Brooker on a Decade of Formal Methods at AWS
YouTube video by Antithesis
https://youtu.be/UGdMf7tC25Y
8 months ago
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This release bundles an MCP server into gopls!
add a skeleton here at some point
8 months ago
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@brancz.com
@asubiotto.com
Are any Polar Signals engineers passing through San Francisco this fall? I'm looking for some speakers for a local meetup, and
www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
would make for a fantastic talk.
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(Mostly) Deterministic Simulation Testing in Go
How we used WASM and some Go runtime modifications to run deterministic simulation tests against FrostDB
https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2024/05/28/mostly-dst-in-go
8 months ago
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Today, FoundationDB is critical infra at Snowflake, Deepseek, Apple, and many other companies. But it started with some guys in a garage, building a demo with plywood and light bulbs... Hear the full story, told by the FDB founders, on the first episode of Antithesis's new BugBash podcast.
#databs
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The BugBash Podcast
Technology Podcast · Updated Semiweekly · The BugBash podcast is a lively look at all aspects of software reliability, by enthusiasts, for everyone. Each episode brings leading engineers and research...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-bugbash-podcast/id1828967504
9 months ago
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Can’t get better than Antithesis and Jepsen together!
add a skeleton here at some point
9 months ago
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