1:1s in Remote First World

In 2020, the world changed overnight. Conference rooms became kitchen counters, watercooler chats turned into chat boxes, and our wardrobes quietly redefined “business casual.” Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Webex went from “nice‑to‑have” to cultural artifact in weeks. Yet the old rules of social chemistry didn’t copy‑paste cleanly. In a 1‑to‑1 video call there’s nowhere to hide, no pastry table to rescue you, and definitely no way to pretend you “just happened to bump into” your boss....

June 1, 2025 · 3 min · sumeet rohatgi

Leading Change, Part 2: Cross Functional Execution

(Read Part 1: Deep Alignment) In part two of the Leading Change series with Craig Ross from Verus Global, we explore how to lead with greater self-awareness and intentional focus. We learn how the mind reacts to pressure, how emotions shape our reality, and how to shift energy from blame to action using the Event Energy Map—a practical tool to help build ourselves and others a shared reality. Stay Focused in High-Stakes Conversations The mind can focus on only one thing at a time....

May 4, 2025 · 2 min · sumeet rohatgi

Leading Change, Part 1: Deep Alignment

Last week I had an opportunity to participate in a powerful leadership workshop led by Craig Ross from Verus Global. It was energizing, insightful, and packed with practical tools to help grow as a collaborative leader. We focused on two core imperatives that must work together: Business: 3-6 months outcomes, like launching our new enterprise cloud platform and modernizing our existing product portfolio. Human: How we work together to get there, through collaboration, accountability, and leadership that’s both empowered and empowering....

May 4, 2025 · 3 min · sumeet rohatgi
The Tech Interactive, San Jose, 2010

AI, ML, and Software Applications

ChatGPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) has taken the world by storm, with Generative AI becoming the mantra of Silicon Valley. However, many people, including myself, find it challenging to truly understand this emerging field. Is it simply about enabling conversations with an all-knowing android? And how does it differ from Machine Learning, the practical application dominating the scene today? GPT is a type of Large Language Model (LLM), a category of machine learning model trained on massive text corpora....

December 29, 2024 · 2 min · sumeet rohatgi
Street Flower Pot, Prague

Notes on FHIR

PHR (Personal Health Records) are a modern innovation designed for interoperability. FHIR is the existing protocol that is leveraged for creating and managing health records. Ultimately, everything in FHIR is represented as a `resource`. There are a total of 157 resource types, and each of them has a baseline that can be extended by providers to stitch together their own customization over the standard protocol. Each resource has attributes, and each attribute can be of different datatypes....

September 1, 2024 · 2 min · sumeet rohatgi
Sweet ride, Embarcadero, San Francisco, US

Conways law for geo distributed teams

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure. — Melvin E. Conway Geographically distributed software teams have become a necessity in many organizations due to cost, manpower, compliance, or growth reasons. Ensuring that these teams function well is crucial for the success of software projects. Here are some strategies to achieve this: Build a strong, shared architectural practice: Foster a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing to ensure that communication patterns are not influenced solely by the teams’ physical locations....

July 18, 2023 · 2 min · sumeet rohatgi
Seattle downtown, WA

Dynamo DB Design

I enjoy reviewing classic industry papers periodically. The DynamoDB paper is fascinating, approachable, and deepens insights on almost every read. Finally, its a good reminder that good programs accomodate different concerns to optimize for others. DynamoDB was built for handling amazon.com’s shared shopping cart problem. Most Amazon customers have a single household account, and any household member should be able to add items to a shared shopping cart at different times on their devices....

April 25, 2023 · 3 min · sumeet rohatgi
A high performing team, Silicon Valley, US

Solving technical problems

Building and operating large-scale software is a relatively young field, and many industry practitioners, including software engineers, often overlook the necessary considerations for doing it well. While “Hello World” examples of software development may serve as good tutorials, they can also give the impression that solving software problems is a trivial task, which fails to acknowledge the significant amount of work and dedication required to achieve quality results. When developing a typical service solution at a big tech company, the following factors must be taken into account:...

April 8, 2023 · 3 min · sumeet rohatgi
Snoopy feeling peachy!, Balboa Island, LA

Magic of the Cloud Control Plane

Tech is changing - more people are using cloud services for computing and storage. Big companies provide the infrastructure and rent it out to customers through network interfaces. The benefits of using cloud services are that customers have easy access to lots of computing power and storage. The company takes care of software updates, so customers can focus on using their software. But what if a customer already has their own data center and running workloads is cheaper there than on the big cloud vendors?...

March 27, 2023 · 2 min · sumeet rohatgi
Lion with broken sword, St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague

Avoid and prevent

Avoiding bad situations, and preventing failures plays second fiddle to building and releasing new features and processes. For example, there is often low motivation or even discussion on improving legal, security, and compliance processes, as they are deemed boring and complex. However, engineering teams continue to pay high cost of proving compliance or firefight incidents that could have been prevented with better telemetry and alerting. Similarly, removing brittle product features and deprecating failed products are taboo, and users continue to deal with abandoned half starts....

January 30, 2023 · 1 min · sumeet rohatgi