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Moving is not for the faint of heart! The surgeon general should issue a warning against moving houses after age 50 . Coordinating our cross-country move was one of the hardest thing I had done. Selling our house in Buffalo, finding a suitable rental house in the Bay Area, figuring out the logistics of the move, getting rid of the furniture we wouldn't transport, boxing everything up, and then on the other side unboxing everything and buying new furniture... It was simply exhausting. Our move has been a long time in the works. For the last 6 years I have been working remotely, first for AWS and then for MongoDB Research, and I have been telling people I would move out of Buffalo any day now. Indeed we could have moved earlier, but we kept putting it off. We waited until my son finished high school, then tried to move last summer. But we got the house on the market too late and it fell through. By then I had already told people I was moving, including an entire table at OSDI 2025. S...

We spent 10 days in Italy in early April. It was a lot of fun. Back when I was a grad student, I stayed in Pisa for a month for a "summer school on mobile computing" in 2003. Mobile computing was the next "big" thing back then. (In retrospect, the research was misguided about the local/distributed approach to it, as most of mobile computing reconciled to cloud backends as that is often more efficient. ) When I was in Pisa, I didn't travel around much, but I now realize I should have spent every weekend traveling. (In my defense, without Internet enabling trip planning/execution, and without GPS on the phone, traveling was very cumbersome, yes, back in 2003.) Rome Rome is amazing! The history is incredibly well preserved. Kudos to the Italians. Rome is very walkable. The buses, on the other hand, were packed solid. My daughters were genuinely surprised by this exotic new form of transportation that does not exist in the US. The art in the Vatican was exquisite. A...

Last week, I traveled to San Jose to attend the ACM CAIS conference . On Day 0, I gave a short talk at the Supporting our AI Overlords (SAO) workshop . And yes, I promise to write a summary of our paper, " A Case for Simulation-Driven Resilience in Agent-First Data Systems " soon!  To start with an overall impression of the conference: much of the work presented felt exploratory and anecdotal. Since the compound AI space is still so new, many work seemed to share on-the-ground best practices that worked for them rather than principled results. Some talks really leaned into the "agent, act like a senior engineer and don't make mistakes" vibe. This was especially apparent in the "Agent Skills Workshop". I am not saying this is a bad thing, I learned some valuable lessons from that workshop, which I'll share below. CAIS defines the conference's scope broadly as "research on compound AI architectures, optimization, and deployment". Unfort...

Ok, finally getting sometime to put my butt down to write about day 2 of BugBash. Why do so few buildings fall down? Brian Potter, Senior Infrastructure Fellow @ Institute for Progress, Author of Construction Physics  newsletter. Buildings rarely collapse. The rate of major structural failing is  between 1/100K to 1/ 1 million. (This is how I know this is a serious statistic: it is an interval.)  Why don't more buildings fall down? There are some technical reasons to it: buildings are simple stuctures with no (or little) moving parts. Buildings exhibit a limited number of behavior when you load their structure: stress, deflection, vibration, creep, etc. And these behaviors are commensurate to the  proportion of the force you put in. Finally, buildings are designed for 2X-3X of expected load. Let's go deeper into structural elements. We have good theories for how structural elements behave, and individual components are tested extensively and are standardized. A build...

These are my notes from the afternoon sessions of BugBash'26 . We had a 75 minute lunch break. Nice lunch, but there were no vegetarian entries, which made Peter Alvaro hangry. I don't blame him, I would be too.  Informal methods Ben Eggers, Member of Technical Staff @ OpenAI This was a fun and also thought provoking talk. The premise is "Nothing has changed about software development". Really? After the LLMs eating software like a wildfire, and particularly rocking at code generation in the last 3 months?? And this is coming from an OpenAI infrastructure engineer, who was once a  8th highest 7d token user. How come?  The talk has two parts: writing code was where the hard parts surfaced agents move the work, but do not obviate it Ok, now it makes more sense. Both of these are sensible statements. Ben followed with a couple disclaimers, that he is talking about deep narrow systems, and not about broad high surface area systems, because he has experience in the former,...

Continuing with notes from the BugBash talks. Yes, all of this goodness, including Will Wilson's keynote was before lunch the first day. Where all the ladders start Peter Alvaro, Associate Professor of Computer Science @ UC Santa Cruz In this talk, Peter reflects back on his 20 years of distributing systems work. The cover image is Don Quixote (which is Peter)  attacking the windmill (robust distributed systems) with a spear (which is some singular solution often borrowed from databases). The first attack was through the use of arcane algebras . This is a purist approach of getting it right the first time. This was during Peter's PhD at UC Berkeley, where Neil Conway was also a peer and collaborator. In his own admission, this was incited by a naive framing around what makes distributed systems difficult? The target was uncertainty regarding order and timing, which cause distributed consistency problems, and require  coordination. But distributed coordination comes at the ...

I attended the BugBash 2026 these last two days, and had a blast. Here are my notes from the first keynote. I will try to find time to publish my notes from the other talks in the coming days. Keynote: We won, what now? Will Wilson, Co-founder & CEO @ Antithesis The Antithesis team opened with a great animation/teaser clip, then Will took the stage. Here is the summary of his talk.  This is not a software testing conference. This is about building reliable software by any means: testing, observability, formal methods, people/culture, better languages. He shows a meme of the five planeteers invoking Captain Planet using their rings. It is time to acknowledge the elephant in the room.  A new contender emerges: AI!! We are now taking a fundamentally unreliable system (AI) to make the systems we are developing reliable. And it is working somehow?! There is a vibe quality to it. When the cost of software generation goes down drastically, you can do a whole lot of it as per Jev...

This is my long-overdue trip report from last summer: July 10–11, 2024. We toured Ivy League campuses to help our rising senior son weigh his options, with our two daughters (our kids are four years apart each) tagging along for an early preview. Day one was Yale and Brown, followed by a night in New Jersey. Day two took us to Princeton and UPenn, then the long drive back to Buffalo. Of course we drove , that's how we roll . Prelude Lining up campus tours is its own sport. They are booked months in advance. Pro-tip: when your kid is born, call the colleges to reserve their campus visit. We lucked into two open slots, then hacked together a Python script to snipe cancellations and grabbed the other two. Not proud of this, but that's what it takes if you don't book months in advance. The U.S. college admissions process is Byzantine. It is a weird mix of ritual and performance. There are entire books about how to write the college essay . I have plenty to say about the so-cal...

This year was a bastard. Not from work. God, no, I find work relaxing. Reading papers, inventing algorithms, ripping apart distributed systems with TLA+ models -- that's how I have fun. I can do that all day with a grin on my face. But the minute I need to do adulting (like simply calling the cable company and ask why keep increasing our bill when I'm not looking), I will stress and procrastinate. And this year, I had a lot of adulting to do to put our house on market, and plan a move to California, all the while juggling to help three kids with school and EC activities. No wonder I've been grinding my teeth at night like a mule chewing rocks... Anywho, we botched our great escape to California. House didn't sell quickly, as we hoped it would, and we are stuck in Buffalo for another year. Summer disappeared in a cloud of errands and disappointment, and suddenly it was late August with our kids twitching with pre-school nerves. There was still some time left to salvage t...

ATC and OSDI ran in parallel. As is tradition, OSDI was single-track ; ATC had two parallel tracks . The schedules and papers are online as linked above. USENIX is awesome: it has been open access for its conference proceedings since 2008. So you can access all the paper pdfs through the links above now. I believe the presentation videos will be made available soon as well. Kudos to USENIX! I attended the OSDI opening remarks delivered by the PC chairs, Lidong Zhou (Microsoft) and Yuan Yuan Zhou (UCSD). OSDI saw 339 submissions this year, which is up 20% from last year. Of those, 53 were accepted, for an acceptance rate of 16%. The TPC worked through Christmas to keep the publication machine running. We really are a bunch of workaholics. Who needs family time when you have rebuttals to respond to? OSDI gave two best paper awards: Basilisk: Using Provenance Invariants to Automate Proofs of Undecidable Protocols. Tony Nuda Zhang and Keshav Singh, University of Michigan; Tej Chajed, Unive...