FAQ Friday

When you wanna build something like this, there are so many decisions to be made. How, as a group of people, do you make those decisions? Well, one of the things that I have really appreciated — and you can look historically at the way we make engineering decisions — is that when I would write down my thinking, my thinking would become much more rigorous.

So there’s a lot to be said for writing things down and reading things. We’re a very writing‑intensive company, and one of the things that we do is we have what we call requests for discussion (RFDs), very much inspired by IETF RFCs. Those requests for discussion allow people to write down any aspect of the system: how they’re thinking about the problem, what is the problem that we’re solving, what are the different things that we’re looking at, and what is the determination at the end.

By writing all of that down, one, the thinking becomes much more rigorous, but then it becomes much easier to socialize. Especially, we are very much a child of the pandemic. We are a remote company. When things are written down, people can understand someone else’s thought process thoroughly. When new folks join Oxide, they can understand why a previous decision was made the way it was made — because sometimes the reason a decision was made doesn’t continue to hold, and you want to actually understand what the rationale is. And then, very importantly, for those folks that are like, "Hey, I’m interested in Oxide, I wanna learn more" — for any given aspect of this system, we’ve got RFDs that describe it. As one customer told me, you all really like to write. We do. We write a lot. The internet has often said that we are not actually a computer company; we are actually a podcasting company that is creating a computer as content creation.

So, very on brand, we actually have an entire podcast episode on our RFDs — RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide — and really encourage you to listen to that — check that out and understand the systems we built around it to socialize those decisions, to socialize that thinking, and to be rigorous in our own thinking and the way we consider all the decisions that we need to go do to make what is ultimately a rack‑scale machine delivering cloud computing on‑prem.