James Cowling, former most senior engineer at Dropbox and current CTO at Convex, shares deep technical insights from his career. Topics include his PhD research on distributed transaction coordination (Granola), Dropbox's massive migration off AWS S3 to custom storage infrastructure (Magic Pocket), multi-region replication strategies, erasure coding, and why simplicity is harder and more valuable than complexity in system design. He also discusses the Go-to-Rust migration for storage nodes to eliminate memory unpredictability, how to execute large-scale migrations safely using dark launches and validation layers, and career advice for engineers navigating the AI era — including the risk of over-engineering and the promotion incentive problem.
