In my previous post, I talked about the problem of running compute on behalf of users, and some early iterations we built, and the problems we ran into. Where we left off We needed a way to run user code, on their behalf, to manipulate data that was being ingested
This is followup to https://blog.achals.com/some-thoughts-on-building-realtime-compute-at-tecton/ - focused on how we built a platform for user code execution at Tecton. If you haven't read it yet - you probably should, cause this post will make more sense if you'
I learned recently that Tecton was getting acquired by Databricks, and with that I also I started to think about the cool work that my team and I worked on that we never got to blog about. Seeing as how it's unlikely that we'll see a
At $DAYJOB, we use a lot Apache Flink for all our stream processing needs. I've used Apache Spark at previous employers and found a lot things very interesting about Flink and figured that writing down my thoughts may help me how I feel about it 😄. What is Flink?
We just visited Mesa Verde National Park and Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in Colorado over the weekend. These two were special for my family, because my wife and I had had visited the other two parks in Colorado, Rocky Mountain and Great Sand Dunes, way back in
19th April 2025 was my last day at Tecton, after 5 years. Tecton has always been the strongest team that I have ever had the good fortune to work with. The amount of depth and empathy that everyone has demonstrated has been extremely impressive. This team has built incredibly complex
I just finished re-reading The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka for the first time after kids, and man, what a gut punch of a book. The thing I found most singular about it is how viscerally it portrays the anxieties and fears of being an adult, specifically being responsible for
I spoke at Rootconf 2024 recently on the work that I've been up to at Tecton over the last couple of years. Not sure how great my slides/presentation was, but I'm extremely proud of the work that my team and I put into this part
I recently read a post by Will Larson that really spoke to me and I wanted to share: [Work On What Matters](https://staffeng.com/guides/work-on-what-matters) In Tech, I've found that there's a great deal of freedom in the day-to-day
Thoughts, stories and ideas on technology & travel.
I'm already beginning to fail my promise of more regular blogging; I think a pretty good way to break through the activation energy is to have shorter posts about relatively uncontroversial topics. To that point - [The Sandman: Endless Nights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_Endless_Nights)
This has been a pretty strange (mostly miserable) year, all thigs considered. But one silver lining out of it has been my relationship with social media - specifically the complete abolishment of the aforementioned relationship. After a brief obsession with "being caught up with news" in the middle of
Mom continues a great writing streak, this time talking about the experience about being a doctor in India. The things she writes about definitely resonate with me, having seen both parents taking their duties as healers very seriously throughout my childhood. [Is it easy being a doctor?](https://medium.com/
My mom wrote some good blog posts about her perspective on dealing with COVID, from the perspective of a doctor who's dealt with pandemics in the past, melded with the point of view of someone living through quarantine herself. I think they're pretty great, but I&
I started writing this post during a great break, when Rish and I are on in Tahoe - where I actually have time to think about what forms the kernel of this post, in a very circular way. Over the past year, I’ve been finding myself spending increasingly larger amounts
At Uber, I’m currently building a self-service task execution platform, which involves getting code/artifacts from different sources, building them if necessary, and executing some commands using the artifacts. One thing that we wanted to support is to allow users to point to a git repository, specify some
I started this blog some (many?) months ago with the hope that it would be an outlet for opinions or thoughts that would be interesting and worth reading. But as the months have gone past, and is obvious from the amount of output I’ve produced, I haven’t been
At Uber, I’m currently building a self-service task execution platform, which involves getting code/artifacts from different sources, building them if necessary, and executing some commands using the artifacts. One thing that we wanted to support is to allow users to point to a git repository, specify some
This post spent a long time fermenting in my brain; I'm still not conviced I've truly nailed down what I want to say about moving from Seattle to the Bay Area. There's so many aspects to it - from the motivation, to the process, and
Rish and I recently went to see the excellent [Jad Abumrad](http://www.radiolab.org/people/jad-abumrad/), co-host of [Radiolab](http://www.radiolab.org/) give a talk at Stanford campus. (I've always loved Radiolab's story telling technique; I'm a big fan of
Yay, blog. I haven't ever maintained one, or even written for public consumption so I can't guarantee that anything here will be worth reading, but I figured it's worth trying.
