Viraj Sinha

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Hello! I'm Viraj Sinha, a software engineer and engineering manager based in Southern California. I work at Relativity Space, building the software that runs the factory.

I love building teams, working with people, and figuring out how to represent complex domains in software.

Here's a few things I recommend reading or watching if you're a software engineer:

• Talks
  • Technical leadership and glue work - Tanya Reilly
  • Overwatch Gameplay Architecture and Netcode
  • Simple Made Easy - Rich Hickey (2011)
  • Scaling Yourself - Scott Hanselman (GOTO 2012)
  • Python Performance Matters - Emery Berger (Strange Loop 2022)
  • The Soul of Erlang and Elixir - Sasa Juric (GOTO 2019)
• Software Engineering Theory
  • Software as theory-building
  • Laws of software evolution
  • Laws of software development teams
  • Ladder Of Abstraction
  • Handoff Waste
  • Big ball of mud and other architectural disasters
  • Systems design explains the world
  • The real cost of an interruption and context switching
  • Inherent vs incidental complexity
  • Developer experience
  • Architecture of open source applications
  • Software Gardening
  • Domain Driven Design (book)
  • A Philosophy of Software Design (book)
• Software Engineering Practice
  • How to write good error messages
  • Latency numbers every programmer should know
  • When to use exceptions
  • 10 Tips for Writing Comments
  • The Pragmatic Programmer Quick Reference Guide
  • Writing Python more like it's Rust
  • Phases of engineering (Bryan Cantrill)
  • Using LLMs (Bryan Cantrill again)
  • Don't let dicts spoil your code (python style)
  • Golang: Building fast docker containers
  • Golang: Testing fast
  • Tigerbeetle style guide
  • Make Software Run Fast
• People
  • The Engineer/Manager Pendulum - Charity Majors
  • What you give up when moving into engineering management
  • Checklist for first time managers
  • Staff Engineer Archetypes
  • How to be a principal engineer
• Technical Writing
  • Documenting Architecture Decisions
  • Architecture decision records
  • Skepticism in Architecture Decisions
  • Tech Writing: Active voice vs passive voice
• Rockets, manufacturing, industrial technology
  • Building Apollo
  • Smarter Every Day: How rockets are made
  • Everyday Astronaut: Rocket engine cycles
  • Everyday Astronaut: Why Starting A Rocket Engine Is So Hard!
  • Understanding Finite Element Method Analysis
  • Materials Science of 3d printing
  • Demonstrating the Powder Bed Fusion process
  • The Tyrrany of the Rocket equation
• Machine Learning
  • Reinforcement Learning world models
• Papers
  • Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
  • Hints and Principles for computer system design