Sameer Ajmani

ajmani.net · English

Father of three in Brooklyn. Engineering Director at Google leading work on the Go language and AI agents. Novice birder.

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Last post: Apr 1, 2024
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Goal Trees for Software Engineering Teams
Apr 1, 2024 · original
In this article, I’ll talk about a modeling technique called Goal Trees and how I’ve found it useful for leading software engineering teams. Back in grad school, I developed JSDSI , an open source Java implementation of Carl Ellison’s Simple public key infrastructure and Ron Rivest & Butler Lampson’s Simple distributed security infrastructure . This work taught me about Java development, public key infrastructure, and computer system security. I read a lot about security at that time, including Bruce Schneier’s book Secrets & Lies , which helped me understand the similarities between computer system security and real-world physical security. I particularly liked Schneier’s threat modeling technique, Attack Trees . Attack Trees are a kind of And-or tree in which each node is a goal, and that node’s children are either alternative ways to achieve that goal (an “or-node”) or are all require
Helping teens learn to lead with DoSomething.org
Mar 18, 2024 · original
In this article, I’ll talk about my service as a board member for DoSomething.org , a nonprofit focused on empowering teens to take action on the issues that matter to them. I joined DoSomething’s board in January 2022 at the invitation of its CEO, DeNora Getachew . My wife, Mandi , and I met DeNora through her work at a previous nonprofit, Generation Citizen , which teaches middle and high schoolers civics and how to effect change by identifying and engaging with their representatives and other community authorities. We appreciated the structure of the program and how it taught young people to take action on problems they cared about, so when DeNora became CEO of DoSomething and invited us to get involved, we were eager to participate. This is the first time I’d ever served on a board, and I had no idea what this entailed. Fortunately there are plenty of tenured board members to help ne
Go, Python, Rust, and production AI applications
Mar 11, 2024 · original
In this article, I’ll talk about Go, Python, and Rust, and each language’s role in building AI-powered applications. Python was the first programming language I ever loved, and Go was the second . But let’s start at the beginning … I discovered the power of programming in my high school linear algebra class. We were learning the Simplex method for linear programming and were expected to memorize the algorithm for an exam. The steps were entirely mechanical but tedious and error prone. I had noticed that our TI-81 calculators supported programming, so I asked the teacher whether I could use it for the algorithm. She agreed. It took me hours to write the program on the calculator, but with it I completed the 45-minute exam in 5 minutes and walked out like a boss. Pascal was the first language I learned formally, then Scheme, C, and C++. As a grad student, I learned Java and became enamored
Go 2022-2024 and beyond: Let’s talk about AI
Feb 27, 2024 · original
In this article, I’ll talk about where we are with Go today and what’s coming next, specifically in the context of how generative AI is changing software development. ( Discussion hosted on LinkedIn ) The last few years have been about maturing the Go platform for mainstream users . We added generics , addressing the top language feature request since Go 1.0. We added feature flags for backwards compatibility , which enable major systems like Kubernetes to extend their support windows. We added automatic updates for forward compatibility , which enable us to fix longstanding language issues like the range variable capture “gotcha” . And we greatly improved the software supply chain security of the Go project itself . We’ve made major improvements to Go’s IDE support in VS Code and in gopls , the Go language server. These now scale to much larger code bases and support a variety of static
Go 2019-2022: Becoming a Cloud team
Feb 23, 2024 · original
In this article, I’ll talk about how we aligned Go with Google Cloud while preserving the core values that make Go great for everyone. When Go joined Google’s Cloud org in 2019, I experienced the greatest culture shock of my career, as did many others on the Go team. Cloud was a newly formed product area under a newly hired leader, Thomas Kurian . TK (as he’s commonly known) worked quickly to define Cloud’s culture around a relentless focus on customer success and generating revenue through sales and customer spend on the platform. The Go team had come from the Google organization formerly known as Technical Infrastructure (TI), where our definition of success had been on growing Go adoption and making Go developers happy. We had no idea how to connect our work to Cloud’s business success . But our leadership expressed strong confidence in Go, calling us “part of Cloud’s DNA”. Fortunatel
Go 2016-2019: My transition to management
Feb 22, 2024 · original
Over the next few articles, I’ll talk about my experience becoming the engineering manager of the Go team and leading the team through several important transitions: from a focus on internal Google users to external Cloud users; from an engineering team of ~20 to a cross-functional team of ~50; and from an engineering-led strategy to one informed by product needs, business concerns, and UX research. 2016 was a complicated year. In March, I started managing the full Go team. In April, we moved our family to a new neighborhood in Brooklyn. In November, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. But my 2016 started with the loss of my little sister, Shama, to suicide. Shortly thereafter, my wife Mandi and I started seeing a therapist together to process our grief and the challenges we were navigating together. Today, I am a much better husband, father, friend, colleague, and m
Go 2012-2016: Early growth
Feb 19, 2024 · original
In this article, I’ll talk about how I got involved with the Go programming language, my first several years working on the Go team, and the factors that contributed to Go’s early growth from 2012-2016. I first encountered Go in 2010, when Rob Pike came to the Google New York office to give a tutorial on the language. At the time I was working on globally distributed storage and indexing systems. In that work I had created a pair of C++ classes to read and write replicated bigtables in a way that ensured read-after-write consistency, even when some replicas were unavailable. Each of my C++ classes was 700 lines of tricky multithreaded code. The code worked, but it was very hard to understand and maintain. Rob Pike’s Go tutorial introduced me to a new way of thinking about concurrency, communicating sequential processes (CSP), and Go provided an elegant syntax and implementation of CSP. I
Introducing myself
Feb 17, 2024 · original
I’m considering doing some public writing, and I’m curious what people are interested to hear from me. In this post, I’ll share a little about myself and what I think I can write well about. Professionally: I’ve worked at Google for nearly 20 years, the majority of that time on the team that develops the Go programming language, a popular language for developing “production software systems”, that is, software systems that run at large scale, reliably and efficiently. Prior to my work on Go, I developed production systems in C++ at Google. My academic background is in computer science; I earned my Masters and PhD in Computer Science in Barbara Liskov’s Programming Methodology Group at MIT. Personally: I live in Brooklyn with my wife and our three children. I was born and raised in Houston, Texas; my parents immigrated from India to Houston in 1970, both as doctors. My father is still pra
You’ve found Sameer Ajmani.
Feb 5, 2016 · original
I’ve worked at Google since 2004. I’ve worked on the Go programming language team since 2012. You can find my posts and talks on Go at ajmani.net/go . You can find my old MIT home page at http://pmg.lcs.mit.edu/~ajmani .

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