Oxide and Friends
Weekly Live Show on Discord
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Live most Mondays at 5pm PT.
Technical Blogging
Books in the Box IV
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
Querying Metrics with OxQL
RTO or GTFO
Reflecting on Founder Mode
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Whither CockroachDB?
The Saga of Sagas
Pragmatic LLM usage with Nicholas Carlini
CrowdStrike BSOD Fiasco with Katie Moussouris
Heterogeneous Computing with Raja Koduri
Innovation Tokens with Charity Majors
Is NVIDIA like Sun from the Dot Com Bubble?
Musing with Changelog's Adam Stacoviak
Rebooting a datacenter: A decade later
Bookclub: How Life Works by Philip Ball
All we have to fear is FUD itself
A Baseball Startup with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel
Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres Freund
Cultural Idiosyncrasies
Adversarial Machine Learning
Data Visualization
Crucible: The Oxide Storage Service
Innovation Stagnation?
Helios
What's taking so long?!
Open Source LLMs with Simon Willison
Predictions 2024!
AMD's MI300 and the Future of Accelerated Compute
Framework Computer with Nirav Patel
OpenAI's Boardroom Brawl
Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz
Launching the Cloud Computer
Open Source and Capitalism with Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob
Settling Beef
Mr. Nagle's Wild Ride
DTrace at 20
Open Source Anti-Patterns with Kelsey Hightower
Fork in the road for Terraform?
No Silver Bullets
Books in the Box III
The Frontend of the Computer
Tales from Manufacturing: Shipping Rack 1
Shipping the first Oxide rack: Your questions answered!
Okay, Doomer: A Rebuttal to AI Doom-mongering
Software Verificationpalooza
Virtualizing Time
Open Source Governance
Building Together: Oxide and Samtec
The Network Behind the Network
Blue Skies Over Mastodon (with Erin Kissane and Tim Bray)
Rust Trademark: Argle-bargle or Foofaraw?
Cabling the Backplane
Get You a State Machine for Great Good
Does a GPT future need software engineers?
On Silicon Valley Bank with Eric Vishria
Rack-scale Networking
Memory Safety with Yael Grauer
Oxide and the Chamber of Mysteries
Revisiting Unikernels
Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends revisit a 7 year old blog post from Bryan regarding unikernels.
The Power of Proto Boards!
Bryan and Adam are joined by members of the Oxide hardware team to talk about proto boards--smaller boards, rapidly designed and delivered that have been instrumental to building the larger boards and the product generally.
Predictions 2023!
Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends review last year's predictions and look ahead 1, 3, and 6 years into the future. What's in store for Rust? Will ChatGPT boom or bust? Will Bryan's prediction of the demise of the term "Artificial Intelligence" come to fruition (finally!)?
Breaking it down with Ian Brown
On December 20th, former Tweep, Ian Brown, joined a Twitter Space about Twitter's architecture. He was surprised when the head Tweep himself joined.. and more surprised when Elon responded to his questions about a proposed rewrite by calling Ian a jackass! The Oxide Friends talk about architecture, rewrites, hubris, fear, curiosity, and safety.
A Debugging Odyssey
Oxide colleague, Dave Pacheco, joins Adam and Bryan to talk about an epic debugging journey. Everyone had something to learn from the struggle to find random data corruption in the Go allocator--Dave included!
Podcasts for Podcast-Lovers
The Oxide Friends bring their podcast recommendations. PCBs, game consoles, sci-fi, business failures, to bad movies--there was a lot of range.
Leaving Twitter with Tim Bray
Tim Bray joins the Oxide Friends to talk about leaving Twitter as a user as Bryan and Adam host their first live show on Discord (adios, Twitter Spaces!).
Mastodon with Kris Nova
Kris Nova joins Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about Mastodon. Kris runs Hachyderm, a Mastodon server. She shares her experience with Mastodon and the Fediverse.
Tech Layoffs
Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends talk about the recent spate of layoffs in tech--the good, the bad, and the ugly. We stumbled into a discussion of the acute impact to those on visas with some great contributions from those who joined us live!
Open Source Firmware
Christian Walker and Philipp Deppenwiese join Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about open firmware, the Open Firmware Conference, and the Open Firmware Foundation.
Let That Sink In! (Whither Twitter?)
As the acquisition of Twitter closed, Bryan called an emergency, one-off session of the Oxide Friends to discuss. Make your own predictions to play along at home.
Open Source Inside Baseball (with Stephen O'Grady)
Stephen O'Grady of RedMonk joins Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about the dead end of proprietary software masquerading as open source that the industry is drifting into. We walk inside baseball including some coordination on the part of offenders. We also talk some actual baseball... but only for about 12:40.
Holistic Boot
Bryan and Adam talk about how Oxide boots its systems--no BIOS, no BMC. A modern server unlike any other server in the market all of which carry 40+ years of the PC legacy.
Engineering Incentives... and Misincentives
Inspired by the incentives at Google that apparently promote launching--but not sustaining--new products, Bryan, Adam and the Oxide Friends discuss the efficacy of various incentives... and the incentives that can lead to unintended and negative outcomes.
Losing the Signal with Sean Silcoff
Sean Silcoff, one of the authors of Losing the Signal, joins the Oxide Friends to discuss his book, the rise and fall of RIM / BlackBerry, and some of his favorite passages. Thanks to Sean for joining us!
Threads, async/await, Promises, Futures
A problem has been eating at Adam: we use async/await in many languages and yet we're not so good at explaining the moving parts. Bryan and the Oxide Friends therapeutically explore the space.
Potpourri: Product, Platform, Paravirtualization
The Oxide Supply Chain
Kate Hicks from Oxide operations joins to talk about the supply chain meltdown, war stories from the past, and the innovative ways she and her team have charted a steady course through these turbulent waters
Bringup Lab Chronicles: A Measurement Two Years in the Making
The Oxide electrical engineers share their experience bringing up a 100Gb link--it's got everything from a purpose-built probing station to a 100Ω resistor that proved to be the difference between life and death (of the company)
Surviving Conventional Wisdom
Bryan, Adam, and Steve consider nuggets of conventional wisdom that turn out to be turds.
RIP Optane
The Oxide Friends pour one out for Optane, Intel's great hope that never managed to find traction.
Deep Tech Investing
Seth Winterroth and Ian Rountree join Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about investing in deep tech / hard tech.
Across the Chasm with Rust
Bryan and Adam talk with Steve Klabnik and Luqman Aden about their deep, abiding love for Rust... despite a rocky start.
Integrating Hardware and Software Teams
Jon Masters joins the Oxide and friends to talk about the benefits of having hardware and software engineers working together... and the peril of separating them!
Books in the box redux
Scott Johnson shares his library of tech/business/culture books
Paths into Systems Programming
Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends tackle the question of how to break into systems programming.. with only some philosophizing on the nature of systems programming... and the nature of software.
The Rise and Fall of DEC
After Bryan's binge reading of all things DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), the Oxide and Friends talk through the its meteoric rise and slow descent into ... Compaq.
Surviving the Dot-Com Bust
Signs are pointing to another tech bust, and we've been through this before. Oxide and Friends reminisce about the 2001 dot-com bust, from layoffs and bankruptcies to shortened commutes and bleak tidings on billboards.
Debugging Methodologies
Jordan Hendricks and Luqman Aden join Bryan and Adam to talk about two terrifying bugs and their commensurately terrific analyses.
Fail Whaling
Joined by Json Hoffman, formerly founder of Joyent, the cloud platform on which Twitter was initially hosted, the Oxide friends reminisce about debugging early issues with Twitter and consider its pending Elonification.
More Tales from the Bringup Lab
Members of the Oxide hardware team talk about their recent bringup struggles and triumphs with the server sled (Gimlet) and rack switch (Sidecar)
Another LPC55 ROM Vulnerability
Laura Abbott joins Bryan and Adam to talk about **another** vulnerability she uncovered in the LPC55
Time, Timezones, Metric Time, Losing and Saving
Time is the bane of programmers and the villain for far too many operator horror stories. Oxide and Friends discuss time, timezones, standard time, daylight time, leap seconds, and how it all can go so so SO wrong.
Trolltron, Assemble!
Unable to resist the call of Trolltron, Bryan and Adam are forced to discuss an odious tweet that undervalues education, struggle, and experience while aggrandizing youth and advocating exploitativeness... at least, in our opinion...
Ukraine
Russia's illegal war in Ukraine has created a humanitarian crisis. For those of us in tech, how can we help? Bryan and Adam talk to Andrey Akselrod, CTO at People.ai, and Ukrainian ex-pat about the crisis, the background, and ways to help.
The Future Of Work
We figured out how to work remotely by necessity. How will that change how we work in the future? Is remote work here to stay? Is it for everyone?
Engineering Culture
Building a strong, virtuous engineering culture is hard. No silver bullets in this Twitter Space, but plenty of pitfalls to avoid.
Breakthroughs Delayed
Steven Johnston's Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer observes that in addition to breakthroughs, and incremental progress, there is a class of innovation that lagged, that could have happened sooner but didn't. In this week's Twitter Space, we talk about technologies that could have happened sooner, but failed to.
I Know This! (Purpose-built systems with general-purpose guts)
Purpose-built systems, computing appliances, are typically built around or on top of general purpose systems. In this week's Twitter Space we look at how those similarities can lead customers to accidental calamity.
Taxonomy of Hype
Hype comes in many forms. In this week's Twitter Space we look at Johannes Klingebiel 5-stage taxonomy of hype and try to slot some of our favorite over-hyped (and under-hyped) technologies into those categories.
Flying Blind with Peter Robison
Peter Robison, author of Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, discusses Boeing, the 737 disasters, corporate culture, and more.
Predictions 2022
The Oxide and Friends revive an old Solaris Kernel Group tradition of making predictions, Adam and Bryan are joined by Redmonk's most famous Red Sox fan, Stephen O'Grady, to make 1, 3, and 6 year predictions. Kelsey Hightower stops to dispense some present and future wisdom.