Since moving from academic research to industry in 2017, I’ve worked on two software projects. Each one started as a small, clean-slate1 skunkworks effort involving 2-3 people and gradually expanded to a large, conventional software engineering effort with dozens of engineers. The first of these (from 2017 to 2021) was Delos at Meta, a Chubby/ZooKeeper/etcd-like control plane storage system. The second was a new Kafka engine (from 2022 to 2024) that can run on any disaggregated storage laye...| mahesh’s blog