Software Engineer | Following is not endorsement.

India
Joined September 2024
Sourav retweeted
Dhoni gave some really solid, straightforward advice. If you haven’t heard it yet, definitely give it a listen. It’s not just for Gen Z, but for people of all ages. This advice is especially relevant in today’s time.
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hey guys can we please stop being racist about the eMudhra CA private key thing
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How on earth did this happen: The Indian certificate authority (CA) eMudhra had one job (well, two): 1. Create secure, 384-bit private keys 2. Store these securely and do not leak them Well, eMudhra chose private keys between 1 and 256 (the numbers!!) and called it a day. WTF
I don't really understand why this would happen. It seems higher-effort than standard key generation.
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The TiDB leaks fulcrumsec.vg/pingcap/
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One of the heaviest rainfall spells of September is possible over Bengaluru during the next 2-3 hours. Please remain watchful and avoid unnecessary travel. A few places may experience significant inundation.
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Hot damn, Meta poached the CEO of a $35B, publicly traded company, MondoDB to lead their enterprise AI efforts… CJ Desai joined MongoDB 11 months ago for a $32M equity grant - and left before the 1 year mark!! By leaving, he gave up most of the equity…. V bad news for MongoDB
Replying to @finkd
To lead this effort, I'm excited that Chirantan "CJ" Desai will join Meta as Chief Enterprise Platform Officer, reporting directly to me. CJ is an experienced enterprise leader with a track record of building full-stack software and delivering results in AI, infrastructure, business applications, and security. He has an extensive industry network that we look forward to partnering with. CJ joins us from MongoDB, where he was CEO and President. Before that he led product and engineering at Cloudflare and spent nearly eight years at ServiceNow, including as President and COO.
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
In my career, compilers have always generated better code that I ever could have. I find this to be increasingly so with contemporary AIs. But you know what neither can do better than me? Knowing what software to write, what shape it should take, and what I want it to do. The entire history of software engineering has been one of rising levels of abstraction. This is how it was, how it is now, and how it shall be in the fullness of time.
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I'm very sensitive to this feeling, cause I've been there. Someone does something cool, gets a lot of attention, and you're frustrated cause you already did it, a while ago. It's not enough to do things, you must also tell people. Maybe it's not fair, but it's true
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Starting with C programming is even better
Google researcher @lauriewired warns the shift from C++ to Python in universities is creating programmers who don't understand how computers actually work: "When I was in college getting my CS degree, my year was one of the last years that was using C++ as the core language for teaching students. Actually they were switching over to Python of all languages." "One of the biggest issues that I have is that a lot of these higher level languages are really abstracting away what is happening under the hood. If you're not aware of how the computers work in general, then you're gonna have problems when it comes to debugging." "Starting with a language like C++ gives you the ability to do these really high level abstractions, but it also gives you the ability to customize your memory management and get really close to the underlying machine. Especially if you're trying to work in high performance computing, game development, or high frequency trading." "At C++ conferences, there's almost this fundamental anger response when it comes to mentioning something like C or C++. People start complaining about the complexity of it." @Google
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This is the most important benefit of using llm
Today I fully implemented std::unique_ptr from scratch. When I was done, I asked Claude Code to review my implementation. It was an amazing learning experience. I discovered so many subtle nuances I haven’t thought about.
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Will AI replace junior software engineers? Anders Hejlsberg (Creator of TypeScript, C#): "Well, if it does, then how do we ever get senior software engineers? I don't think so. Not unless you also believe that you will be able to do your business three years later than that without any senior software engineer. But to me, I think maybe one thing that to some extent has happened is that for certain classes of programmers, the pyramid has narrowed at the bottom. There are fewer people coming in, and we are wanting them to advance higher up faster so that they can get to this more supervisory role. I think the craft of being a software engineer is definitely changing from you're typing in lines of code to you're having agents type in lines of code, and you are reviewing the work of the agents. But it is but a tool, and there are still programmers involved in the process. That I firmly believe." For the full conversation, you can search Anders' name on my YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts (link in bio)
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"What's the point of humans" - Now that's a deep question!
Will AI write +90% of all code this year? Anders Hejlsberg (Creator of Typescript, C#): "For certain classes of apps that might be like all of I coded apps are writing 100% of the code. And there's an awful lot of that being written. Are they going to write 90% of the high quality code on the Internet? I don't know about that. I know that AI could not write our compiler, the Typescript compiler. It just can't. We've tried it can't do it. And I'm not asking it to either. I'm not saying it's not impressive. It's wildly impressive what it can do, But I just think there's a long way still to it's doing all of it. And I don't know that we ever get there. I hope we don't. Because then what's the point of humans anymore?" For the full conversation, you can search Ander's name on my YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts (link in bio)
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And that's why we should review AI generated code.
Why Microsoft didn't have LLMs do their recent Typescript native rewrite in Go Anders Hejlsberg (Creator of Typescript): "If we just let AI loose on, what is it, half a million lines of code that we have in the old compiler? Well, I don't know that that would absolve us from then having go in and carefully examining every line that came out of it to make sure that there were no hallucinations. Right. Unless you have 100% perfect test coverage, you probably still gotta go check all of that. Now I think a better approach, quite honestly, would be enlist AI to write a program that helps you translate from TypeScript to go, because at that point you can park the stochastic ness in that program and then you can get deterministic behavior whenever you run the program, which means you get the same transformation every time you run it. Right. That's always the thing about AI that people forget it's not deterministic. Right. So you can't really trust that it's going to do the same thing twice. For the full conversation, you can search Anders Hejlsberg's name on my YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts (link in bio)
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Good moment today to remind everyone to stay frosty with AI. I was working on making a server stoppable via the CLI, and Codex decided the best path forward was to implement an unauthenticated network API to every server to shut itself down. Excellent work. I responded with "I don't know about that." (I usually give more direct feedback but this was so absurd) and it thought for like 20 seconds and responded "Server stopping should not be part of an unauthenticated network API." Yes. lol. By the way, the result I was looking for was that we automatically start a locally discovery Unix-socket bound server so I wanted it to discover that (using prior mechanisms already made) and gracefully stop that. The driver is absolutely accountable here (me). My lazy prompting led AI to think I wanted to be able to stop ANY configured server I was talking to. Shame on me for thinking it was obvious here. But, I also reviewed it and found this idiocy, so, that's where good AI drivers come in. Also me.
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This is good advice even for senior engineers.
One secret to being an ultra-influential leader is to take 5 minutes to simulate your meetings every morning. For each meeting, visualize: how you want it to go, what role you will play in it, what could derail the meeting, how you want people to feel during & at the end of it.
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So many times I have learnt from senior engineers because they commented on my PR. Comments by agents don't have the same touch.
It used to be the case that reviewing a contributor's PR was a form of "investment" in that contributor. They'd learn from your feedback, grow, take it into account for future contributions, etc. Unfortunately with agents I feel that's largely gone.
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