Cindy Sridharan (@copyconstruct) / X

Cindy Sridharan

11.7K posts

Cindy Sridharan

@copyconstruct

San Francisco, CA

copyconstruct.medium.com

Joined July 2010

Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
Oct 23, 2019
Kubernetes
SportsCenter
00:00
SportsCenter
Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
Dec 25, 2024
Many “anti-DEI” legal immigrants who celebrated Trump are now realizing that “America first” is fundamentally incompatible with their dreams of “global meritocracy”. And that Trump’s core base is comprised of people who find their presence in America to be rather undesirable.
Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
Dec 14, 2024
From personal experience, I know how hard and frustrating it can be to be an Indian immigrant stuck in a never ending green card queue, but I doubt acting entitled, or worse, *disparaging* other nationalities as less deserving serves the cause very well. Let’s not be jerks.
Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
Oct 23, 2025
The detailed AWS incident report is out, and it’s worth a read - DNS records managed by 2 systems; a race condition led to regional record getting unset - EC2 lease establishment was borked as it depends on DynamoDB - fluctuating NLB health checks leading to EC2 DNS entry purges
Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
Dec 28, 2024
Ok, Elon going thermonuclear on nativists and racists, defending the H-1B visa to *this*,degree wasn’t on my bingo card. A very pleasant surprise, but given the amount of vitriol and hatred thats been aimed at immigrant tech workers, this is extremely welcome.
Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
Jan 5, 2022
Microservices or not, one of the best things you can do to improve your own productivity is to have a fast, local development environment setup with minimum dependencies and ways to introspect isolated parts of your codebase.
Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
Mar 6, 2023
Thinking of the time Elon publicly fired an Android engineer for saying that the app was slow because of technical debt and a full rewrite is needed to address perf problems. 3 months on, Elon himself proposes a full rewrite himself, because a config change caused an outage. 😅
Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
Apr 6, 2020
- Microservices are hard. - Building reliable and testable microservices is a lot harder than most folks think - Effectively *testing* microservices requires a ton of tooling and foresight. - A Netflix/Uber style microservices isn't required by many (most?) orgs. - Macroservices?
Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
Jun 14, 2025
Full report for yesterday’s Google outage - not feature flagging a new code path - null pointer crashing a binary when reading empty fields from Spanner - remediation causing a thundering herd as there was no exponential backoff - which required manual throttling to recover from
Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
Nov 22, 2022
The most ill-conceived idea that seems to have ossified among certain group of people is that Twitter was failing because the engineering culture wasn’t high-performing enough The problem with Twitter was product and leadership, and not engineering not executing well enough.
Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
Dec 26, 2020
Dropbox famously built their own data centres and moved off of S3 to reduce costs, and now moved *back* to AWS (DynamoDB, S3) again to save costs for their metadata storage, because it turned out scaling MySQL was hard for this use case.
Alki, or how we learned to stop worrying and love cold metadata
From dropbox.tech
Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
Nov 14, 2022
Tech Debt is one of those things that make sense to engineering, but to leadership it sounds like “we’ve created a mess over the years that slowed the product, we did nothing to fix it, and now we need to spend *even more* time and people on fixing it”. Not a winning argument.
Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
Nov 16, 2022
The hill I will die on: technical debt is an engineering problem and is owned by engineering, not “product” and not your C-suite. By engineering I mean the engineering org and those at the higher echelons, not the junior-ish engineers who are the leaf nodes in the org chart.
Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
Feb 26, 2023
This was the woman who posted a picture of herself sleeping in the office to meet Elon’s deadlines. At the time, a lot of prominent people lauded this, saying “this is how the most impressive software is built”. Fast forward a couple of months and she’s fired.
Zoë Schiffer
@ZoeSchiffer
Feb 26, 2023
Just got confirmation that Esther Crawford, chief executive of Twitter Payments, is out.