Oxide and Friends

Paul Frazee joins Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about the inner workings of Bluesky and the AT Protocol. Paul and the Bluesky team have been working on decentralized systems for years and years--very cool to see both the next evolutionary step in those ideas and their successful application in Bluesky!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included our special guest, Paul Frazee, and slightly-less-special guest, Steve Klabnik.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:ScuttlebuttBluesky FirehoseBluesky JetstreamBluesky and the AT ProtocolBluesky Feed: Quiet PostersBluesky's bot invasion: AI accounts argue with everything you postAI Imagery labeleratprotoOxide starter packIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Bryan and Adam were joined by Theo Schlossnagle, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, and Steve O'Grady to talk about conferences in tech. A lot has changed in the past couple of decades about the impetus for conferences and what makes it worthwhile to attend.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Theo Schlossnagle, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, and Steve O'Grady.The lightly edited live chat from the show:ellie.idb: 2005, huh? y’all met when i was 2goodjanet: yea i was younger than 10 loljgrillo_: I was just thinking I feel very young because I was a junior in high school but not anymore lolaka_pugs: my first conference - 1975ellie.idb: oxide appeals to the youthjbk1234: my first one was LISA in 05 or 06... mostly because it took a near act of god because my director didn't believe in sending his people to conferencesjgrillo_: "before software ate the world" is what I usually call "when the internet was still fun"ellie.idb: my earliest memory was, uhhh, Google I/O 2008 when they gave every attendee that android phoneellie.idb: i don’t recall which one it was, but i do remember playing with it when i was 5 hahahahataitomagatsu: I've only been to one tech conference in person, and it was a very tame SIGGRAPH that happened in Santiago, CL (I live in Chile). It was a lot about animation. I wanted it to have talks on image processing like the ones over on the US x3 but oh well, beggars can't be choosersgoodjanet: I've never been to a tech conferencedevdsp2175: The Germans know how to run a conference. The chaos communications congress is wild.ellie.idb: same!! never actually attended one as an adult hahahataitomagatsu: Have you attended one remotely?goodjanet: nope, closest is just watching recorded talks after the facttaitomagatsu: I attended the rustconf of 2 years ago remotely. It was amazing and I was soooo tired by the end of it. Brain got depleted of juice for the daynetwork2501: looking forward to in person dtrace conference with a dedicated zball roomahl0003: more of a trade show, but I went to the MacWorld conference in the late '90sahl0003: I still have some BeOS install CDs from thengoodjanet: im so thankful for recorded talksahl0003: this is kind of wild: I went with my brother who was 12 or so and we met a guy at Be... my brother would go on to work with him 30 years later!ellie.idb: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Droid the OG droid with the flip up keyboard and everythingtocococa: ISCA this year was just around the corner from Santiago in Buenos Aires and it was pretty cool, and CARLA took place this year in Santiago tooblacksmithforlife: Since I can never get a conference approved from work, I live off recorded conference videos on YouTubenetwork2501: best momdevdsp2175: The shade! Sending hugs to Bryan's inner child.taitomagatsu: daaaaaamn, I didn't know about either! I might keep an eye on ISCA, maybe I can go next year ❤️devdsp2175: You can't record the hallway track...jh179: Bryan's talk for Papers We Love on the History of Containers is how I found out about him, Oxide and all the rest. Had an incredible tangent about jails...zeanic: Conference idea: all hallway tracksdevdsp2175: YouTube keeps recommending Bryan's talks on running containers on the metal at Joyant.devdsp2175: And I keep watching them!ellie.idb: wow, ISCA had some really fucking cool talks this yearellie.idb: damn. i’m adding this to my watch list too!!! i’ll try and see if i can get funding for next year hahahatocococa: yeah, 100%, but my brain was melted after every daynahumshalman: Bryan has the luxury of working on OSS. I think the point that Theo was making is that Surge (I only attended the very last one) was a space where you could be open about proprietary stuff. Talking about failure in a safe space, etc.nahumshalman: Ah, Theo is now making that point.taitomagatsu: Does ISCA have any sort of official YT channel?taitomagatsu: Because I might... have a handful of talks to watchgoodjanet: 18 years ago isnt that long ago?network2501: 18 years ago is almost 3 generations of lives/eras agoellie.idb: what HPC conferences are going on? i need to hear about the deets going on with CXLjgrillo_: although 18yr is ~half my life it doesn't feel very long ago..tocococa: I am not sure, I know that all keynotes were recorded, but I don´t know where they might beellie.idb: 21 years ago i was not alive 😅network2501: What if the second time you do the talk it's even better than the last? Like book revisions?ahl0003: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i1OK4y9x0wtaitomagatsu: I've found a channel that has older ISCA videos https://www.youtube.com/@acmsigarch2299, imma keep looking for one that might have the 2024 oneblacksmithforlife: Working in government, watching "old" conference videos is great because they're "cutting edge" for where my organization is at currently. Case in point, we are just now going to the cloud and doing micro servicestaitomagatsu: https://xkcd.com/979/ahl0003: https://craft-conf.com/2025srockets: T

Holy Sh**! Pat Gelsinger announced his "retirement" leaving a rudderless Intel without a captain. How did Intel get here? Some of the cultural problems may be deep in the DNA. Bryan and Adam have some ideas for what happens next, and who might be the next CEO.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Ian Grunert.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Intel announces the retirement of Pat GelsingerAndy Jassy/Pat Gelsinger re:Invent 2018 premises/premise supercutAcquired: Adapting Episode 3: IntelCHM: Pat Gelsinger Oral HistoryWins Above Replacement (WAR)Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy GroveLarrabeeCannon LakeOxF: RIP OptaneXsight's X2NervanaIntel GaudiSpring HillInvest Like the Best: Redefining Semi-conductor ProgressIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Bryan and Adam were joined by authors of the forthcoming book "Writing for Developers", Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop, to talk about blogging--for Bryan and Adam, it's been 20 years since they started blogging at Sun. The Oxide Friends were also joined by Tim Bray and Will Snow who kicked off blogging at Sun.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Tim Bray (BlueSky), Will Snow, Cynthia Dunlop and Piotr Sarna.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Writing for Developers50% off (!) with code OXIDE50ongoing by Tim BrayTim Bray on blogs.sun.comScobleizerBryan: Blogging through the decadesBryan: Remembering Charles BeelerAdam: APFS in Detail: ConclusionsBeastie Boys Book: Live & DirectAdam: AWS Outposts by the Numbers: A Far-Too-Deep Dive Into PricingAdam: I Love Go; I Hate GoAdam: I am not a resourceAdam: First Rust Program Pain (So you can avoid it...)Bryan: Falling in love with RustAdam: On Blogging (Briefly)Bryan: The Power of a PronounAdam: DTrace "Scobleized"Appendix: Cool Technical BlogsCrowdsourced by the Oxide Friends:Nova - in the writer's words, "a JavaScript apologist's exploration of how JavaScript could be good"The Pragmatic EngineerTigerBeetleFaster than Lime - a very humane and deep dive into all sorts of technology, with special focus on tools and infrastructure. Recommended article: I want off Mr. Golang's Wild RideHillel Wayne - tons of formal methods talk. Also about quality assurance in the world of software, in general.Reid Atcheson - down the rabbit hole of computational math; this person is a floating point savant.Computational Complexity Blog - what it says on the tin. It might be the best blog-like resource on computational complexity.Without boatsBonus technical articles from chat and beyond:Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY - Saagar JhaShip Shape: How Canva does hand-drawn shape recognition in the browserRust after the honeymoon - Bryan CantrillRedpanda vs. Kafka: A performance comparison25% or 6 to 4: the 11/6/23 authentication outage - DiscordMeta: From zero to 10 million lines of KotlinSun almost bought Apple in 1996If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

The 4th installment of the Oxide and Friends book recommendation series. After a brief(ish) diversion into Crimson Twins, Tomax and Xamot, Bryan and Adam are joined by several Oxide Friends to discuss their favorite recent reads.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Nick Gideo, Josh, Ian Grunert, Tom Lyon, Zander, and Oliver Herman.Tomax and XamotRecommendations:Into the Raging Sea - SladeThe Making of Prince of Persia - Jordan MechnerThe Big Score - MaloneCHM: Oral History of Hector RuizAMD Founder Jerry Sanders Rare Interview (video)Chip War - MillerCHM: Morris Chang, in conversation with Jen-Hsun Huang (video)Acquired: TSMC (audio)Creativity Inc. - Catmull and WallaceHardcore Software - SinofskyOxF: The Showstopper ShowExploding the Phone - LapsleyThe Cuckoo's Egg - StollInside the Hidden World of Elevator Phone PhreakingThe Last BookstoreThe MouseDriver Chronicles - Lusk, HarrisonHatching Twitter - BiltonCharacter Limit - Conger, MacThe Maniac - LabatutShift Happens - WicharyThe Last Philosopher in Texas - ChaconThe Idea Factory - GertnerObservability Engineering - Majors, Fong-Jones, MirandaRed Cloud at Dawn - GordinBiohazard - AlibekMore Money than God - MallabyRemembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War - CarlsonIBM and the Holocaust - BlackBryan's blog on the topicDEC is Dead, Long Live DEC - Schein, DeLisi, Kampas, SonduckOxF: The Rise and Fall of DECBonus recommendations from chatNot the End of the World - RitchieThe Man Who Broke Capitalism - GellesChildren of Time (series) - TchaikovskyThe Murderbot Diaries (series) - WellsOrganizational Behavior Real Research for Real Managers - PearceHacking: The Art of Exploitation - EricksonTakeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power Hardcover - RybackSuccessful Aging - Levitin (felt like maybe a dig at Adam and Bryan?)Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape and How It Challenged Microsoft - Quittner, SlatallaCreative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs - KociendaIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

George Cozma of Chips and Cheese joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about AMD's new 5th generation EPYC processor, codename: Turin. What's new in Turin and how is Oxide's Turin-based platform coming along?In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest George Cozma, as well as Oxide colleagues Robert Mustacchi, Eric Aasen, Nathanael Huffman, and the quietly observant Aaron Hartwig.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Chips and Cheese: AMD's Turin: 5th Gen EPYC LaunchedEnd of the Road: An Anandtech FarewellCentaur TechnologyAVX-512Zen5's AVX512 Teardown + More...Thermal Power Design (TDP)OxF: Rack Scale Networking (use of p4)P4AGESAOxF: The Network Behind the Network (Oxide server recovery)openSILphoronix: openSILPCB backdrillingOxF: AMD's MI300 (APUs)dtrace.conf(24) -- The DTrace unconference, December 11th, 2024If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Bryan and Adam were joined by Oxide colleague, Ben Naecker, to talk about OxQL--the Oxide Query Language we've developed for interacting with our metrics system. Yes, another query language, and, yes, we're DSL maximalists, but listen in before you accuse us of simple NIH!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Oxide colleague, Ben Naecker.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:RFD 463: The Oxide Query LanguageGenAI podcast on the OxQL RFDRFD 125: Telemetry requirements and building blocksInfluxDBClickHouseSimon Willison: SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQLOxide CLI timeseries docsOxide CLI timeseries dashboard codeOxQL source codeRust peg crateGorillaClickhouse paperOxF: Whither CockroachDB?ANTLRACM Queue 2009: Purpose Built LanguagesIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

With Amazon's return to office (RTO) mandate in the news, Bryan and Adam revisit the topic (it's been 2.5 years since last time!). Are in-office epiphanies real or is RTO fueled by nostalgia, fear... and finance? Stay tuned / we apologize for the exposition on in-office games.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included friend of the pod, Matt Amdur, and Chris.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Message from CEO Andy Jassy: Strengthening our culture and teamsOxF: The Future of WorkAmazon leadership principlesNathanael's blog: Building Big Systems with Remote Hardware TeamsIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

With some time passed, Bryan and Adam offer a non-hot take on Paul Graham's "Founder Mode" post. While there is plenty to quibble over, there's also the kernel of an important idea: how to balance experience, novel thinking, and limited time? Also stay tuned as they share a years old "ego con".Your hosts were Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Paul Graham Founder ModeBryan Reflecting on Founder ModeTim O'Reilly How I FailedCamille Fournier Founder Create ManagersBryan Chesky interview we mentionOxF: on Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big ThingSeagull ManagementHow to Castrate a Bull NOT AN ENDORSEMENT; DO NOT READThe ego con: Non-Stop HitzIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

RFDs--Requests for Discussion--are how we at Oxide discuss... just about everything! Technical design, hardware component selection, changes in process, culture, interview systems, (even) chat--we have RFDs for all of these, over 500 in a bit under 5 years. Bryan and Adam were joined by Oxide colleagues instrumental to RFDs, from their most prolific author to those making them more consumable.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues, Robert Mustacchi, David Crespo, Ben Leonard, and Augustus Mayo.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:We're sorry, GermanyOxide RFD siteRFD 1: Requests for DiscussionA Tool for Discussion (Oxide blog post from Ben)Sun PSARC casesThe Queen's DuckThe Hairy ArmJoyent RFDsRFC-3AsciiDocJoyent RFD 77OxF: Hiring Processes with Gergely OroszOxide RFD API... with it's CLI generated by progenitor... which we talked about some on OxF here and here"Own your strategic weirdness"RFD 113: Engineering Determination, or how we close out RFDsIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Lots of engineering decisions get made on vibes. Popularity, anecdotes—they can lead to expedient decisions rather than rigorous ones. At Oxide, our choice to go with CockroachDB was hardly hasty! Dave Pacheco joins Bryan and Adam to talk about why we choose CRDB… and how Cockroach Lab’s recent switch to a proprietary license impacts that.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Dave Pacheco.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:TechCrunch: Cockroach Labs shakes up its licensing to force bigger companies to payKelsey's TweetOxide RFD 53: Control plane data storage requirementsOxide RFD 110: CockroachDB for the control plane databaseOxide RFD 508: Whither CockroachDBJoyent blog post on the outage due to postgres autovacuumJepsenDave's CRDB exploration repoChronyOxF: A Debugging Odyssey -- debugging an issue that manifested in CRDBThe Liberation of RethinkDBIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

The Oxide control plane coordinates multiple services to do complex, compound operations. Early on, we knew we wanted to provide a robust structure for these multi-part workflows. We stumbled onto Distributed Sagas and built our own implementation in Steno. Bryan and Adam are joined by several members of the Oxide team who built and use Steno to drive the complex operation of the control plane.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Dave Pacheco. Eliza Weisman, Andrew Stone, Greg Colombo, and James MacMahon.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Distributed Sagas: A Protocol for Coordinating Microservices - Caitie McCaffreyOxide RFD 107: Workflows EngineStenochat: "the trouble with other people's workflow engines, somehow with all the yaml in the world they're never quite extensible enough"Not our first bit of background noise on OxF (trombone)SAGAS paperchat: "when i hear sagas i think "transaction semantics enforced at the application layer" and when i hear workflow i hear "a dsl that doesn't have a for loop""Automated saga testingOxide RFD 289: Steno UpgradeFeral Concurrency Control paper from Berkeley and the University of SydneyEliza's PRSteno's description of its divergence from Distributed SagasAWS "constant work" blogchat: "Now, migrate the owl."OxF on formal methodsA complex bug with sagas: "tl;dr there's TWENTY steps in 5042 that leads to an accounting bug"Oxide RFD 373: Reliable Persistent WorkflowsEliza's novella on updating an instanceIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Nicholas Carlini joined Bryan and Adam to talk about his terrific blog post on his many pragmatic uses of LLMs to solve real problems. He has great advice about when to use them (often!) and what kinds of problems they handle well. LLMs aren't great at many things, but used well they can be an amazing tool.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest, Nicholas Carlini as well as by listeners Mike Cafarella, p5commit, and chrisbur.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Nicholas' blog: How I Use "AI"The McLaughlin GroupSurge 2011 ~ Closing Plenary ~ Theo SchlossnagleMicrosoft's Tay chatbotCurb Your Enthusiasm: Larry vs. SiriSal Khan on LLMsGoogle's awful AI adGoogle pulls adIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Bryan and Adam were joined by security expert, Katie Moussouris, to discuss the largest global IT outage in history. It was an event as broadly impactful as it will be instructive; as Bryan noted, you can see all of computing from here, from crash dumps to antitrust.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Katie Moussouris.PRs needed!If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Raja Koduri joined Bryan and Adam to answer a question sent in from a listener: what's are the differences between a CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC? And after a walk through history of hardware, software, their intersection and relevant companies, we ... almost answered it!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Raja Koduri.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:3dfx Oral History Panel with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell3dfxOpenGLGlideDirect3DCUDADennard scalingVLIWGPGPUAMD APUEnergy Efficiency and AI HardwarePRs needed!If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Charity Majors joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about the idea of "innovation tokens"--a fixed budget for, so called, "innovative" projects. When is boring better and when is innovation the safer approach? Is Oxide issuing innovation tokens in some sort of hyper-inflationary cycle!?In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Charity Majors.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Glyph: Against Innovation TokensCharity's Twitter ThreadOxF: Let That Sink In! (Whither Twitter?) with CharityDruidScuba whitepaperOxide RFD 68: Partnership as Shared ValuesGood Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard RumeltDropshot and ProgenitorOxF: The Pragmatism of HubrisOxF: HeliosIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Every so often we like to give our Oxide and Friends hot takes (or as Adam puts it "Bryan getting trolled on Twitter"). This time, a viral tweet suggests that NVIDIA is on the same trajectory as Sun Microsystems on its ascent during the Dot Com Bubble. From two alumni of Sun's rise and fall: maaaaybe not.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Todd Gamblin.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:The Tweet!OxF: Innovation Stagnation? -- wherein we forgot to read the tweetFramework laptop RISC-V mainboardTadpole SPARCbookOxF: A Requiem for SPARC with Tom Lyon -- we're RISC dead-endersAcquired on NVIDIA: part I, part II, part III, JensenRIVA 128OxF: Steve Jobs & the Next Big ThingIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Bryan and Adam were joined by The Changelog’s Adam Stacoviak for a … wide ranging conversation! Something for everyone—especially fans of HBO’s Silicon Valley!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Adam Stacoviak.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Bryan on ChangelogChangelog: 23 years of Ruby with MatzSWOTBachmanity InsanityStraight outta KubeconBreakmaster CylinderAdam Stac on githubChangelog Dance Party by BMCComputer History Museum: Oral HistoriesBryan's talk on social audioIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Back in May 2014 Joyent accidentally rebooted an entire datacenter (not just the handful of nodes as intended!). That incident--traumatic was it was--informed many aspects of the Oxide product. Bryan and Adam were joined by members of that former Joyent team to discuss, commiserate, and--perhaps--get some things off their chests. a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Josh Clulow, Brian Bennett, Robert Mustacchi, and Steve Tuck.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:The Register: Fat-fingered admin downs entire Joyent data centerBryan's talk: Debugging Under FireOxide and Friends on the Oakland BallersThe Ur AgentJoyent post-mortemPRs needed!If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

The long-awaited Oxide and Friends bookclub! Bryan and Adam were joined by special guest--and real life biologist--Greg Cost to discuss Philip Ball's terrific book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. Spoiler: Alan Turing makes a very expected appearance!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Greg Cost.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:The Turing patternRNA as a precursor to DNAXenopus frogXenobotsAnton computerBryan's reading notesCentral themesPower and limitations of metaphor – especially mechanical onesThe fundamental, diametrical opposition between life and machines. (Nature does not use simulations!)Rejecting the neo-Darwinian paradigmPassages of note:p. 91: “of the common SNPs seen in human populations, fully 62 percent are associated with height” … “the most common genomic associations for complex traits like this are in the noncoding regions” What is cognition? p. 137: “Life is, as biologist Michael Levin Jeremy Gunawardenaand philosopher Daniel Dennet have argued, ‘cognition all the way down’” AlphaFold2 p. 148 “AlphaFold does not so much solve the infamously difficult protein-folding problem as sidestep it. The algorithm makes no predictions about how a polypeptide chain folds, but simply predicts the end result based on the sequence.”p. 156: allostery refers to how a🤯 p. 160: “The popular view that science is the process of studying what the world is like needs to be given an important qualification: science tends to be the study of what we can study.”p. 166: “The misfolding pathology of PrPs (prion proteins) is the price paid for the benefits of disorder. … Disordered proteins can increase the complexity and versatility of our regulatory networks, but at the cost of increased risk of toxic aggregates formed from misfolded proteins.”p. 181: “The [training] analogy is far from perfect, not least because proteins don’t need to be ‘trained’ to acquire their roles.” Ball himself loves to use computing a metaphor, even when it is inapt or imperfect!p. 189: “What you’re really looking at here is a diagram not of a molecular event but of a failed paradigm.”p. 201: Clifford Brangwynne: “Many of the textbooks and even our language conveys this kind of factory-floor image of what goes on inside the cell. But the reality is that the computational logic underlying life is much more soft, wet and stochastic than anyone appreciates.” To which I would add: the information machine is MUCH more deterministic than anyone appreciates!p. 205: “Because the binding of BMPs to BMP receptors can be altered by other molecules, the BMP pathway can interact with other pathways to create crosstalk between cells during development.” Mike Olson’s observation of everything working through side-effect. 🤯 p. 212: “It seems likely that metazoans have evolved this evolvability. One of the odd features of transcription factors that bind to DNA is that, in eukaryotes, the base sequences that they recognize are often surprisingly short – perhaps six or so base pairs long. … But there’s no reason the selectivity has to be this approximate; in prokaryotes the binding sites are longer and therefore more specific. It seems that eukaryotes have, so to speak, chosen this sloppiness – probably because it allows new regulatory pathways to develop.”p 217: “While causal emergence seems to be a general design principle for life, it is rarely evident in our own technologies.” Disagree with: “...maybe the better computers of the future will be more causally emergent.” We can’t even get asynchronous systems working!🤯 p. 222: “Is there, after all, really such an obvious advantage to being multicellular? If so, we don’t know what it is.” … “If [evolutionary biologist Michael] Lynch is right, the implication is humbling: we are here not because the multicellular lifestyle of metazoans like us is superior or even advantageous, but because chance mutations created possibilities for new regulatory and multicellular behaviors that natural selection merely found no reason to eliminate.”p. 226: “If we want to understand the mechanisms behind some key evolutionary shifts – for example, the emergence of complex body shapes and lifestyles in the Cambrian explosion, the emergence of nervous systems and of new modes of cognition, and the divergence of mammals and other vertebrates – genomes are the wrong place to look.”p. 245: “The switching of cell states often happens gradually rather than by abrupt switching at a sharply defined fork in the landscape.”p. 248: “One of the most useful pieces of advice I heard from Nature’s biology editor many years ago was that the answer in biology is always ‘yes’”p. 258: “Such leveraging of noise, the researchers suggested, might represent ‘a central and unifying principle underlying the properties of stem and progenitor cells that are central to the evolution of metazoan life.’ Noisiness helps to keep all the cell-fate options open.”p. 2

The Oxide Friends have talked about the Hashicorp license change, the emergence of an open source fork of Terraform in OpenTofu, and other topics in open source. A few weeks ago both InfoWorld and Hashicorp (independently?) accused OpenTofu of stealing Terraform code—a serious claim that turned out to be fully unfounded. We (you!) have been lucky to avoid this topic with a couple of guests lined up to talk about the xz exploit discovery and founding the Oakland Ballers… but we ran out of distractions! Bryan and Adam talk about this FUD and FUD generally.Your hosts were Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Infoworld: OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to forkOpenTofu responsePRs needed!If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Bryan, Adam, Steve, and the Oxide Friends are joined by the founders of the Oakland Ballers, the continuation of a long history of baseball in Oakland. There turns out to be a plenty in common between founding a computer company and founding a baseball team--and we both have our fans supporting us!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by very special guests Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel as well our somewhat-special boss, Steve Tuck.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:The Oakland BallersBryan and Adam at Manaea's no-noThe Munson-Nixon lineThe Pioneer LeagueBaseball's longest gameAdam's neighbor, Bill George, scorer of the longest gameYolo HighwheelersBART's sponsorship of the BallersJ.T. Snow joins the BallersJ.T. saves Dusty's sonIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Andres Freund joined Bryan and Adam to talk about his discovery of the xz backdoor. It’s an incredible story… so great to get into the details with Andres. We started by ranting about the coverage in the New York Times… coverage that explicitly refused to dig into the details! It’s all the more shocking because the big story here is how Andres’ penchant for digging into the details is what saved us all from what would have been a pervasive and damaging attack!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Andres Freund.Our research for this episode:Andres' initial public disclosureNew York Times: Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack? by Kevin RooseKevin RooseNew York Times front page from April 4th, 2024How I got started as a developer with Andres Freund & Heikki Linnakangas | Path To Citus Con Ep08The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind | WIREDHow one volunteer stopped a backdoor from exposing Linux systems worldwide - The VergeLinux backdoor was a long con, possibly with nation-state support, experts say - Nextgov/FCWresearch!rsc: Timeline of the xz open source attackBrian Krebs thread on mastodonXz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation ExplainedA Microcosm of the interactions in Open Source projectsRisky Business #743 -- A chat about the xz backdoor with the guy who found it (podcast)Risky Biz News: F-Droid narrowly avoided XZ-like incident in 2020 (podcast)What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world | Ars TechnicaEverything I know about the XZ backdoorLINUX Unplugged 556: The xz Backdoor Exposed 🚨 (podcast)If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!Recorded April 8th, 2024

The Oxide Friends talk about about cultural idiosyncrasies--turns out we have a lot of them at Oxide! Some might even sound good enough for you to try out! Demo Fridays, morning water-cooler, no-meet Wednesdays, recorded meetings, dog-pile debugging (aka CSPAN for debugging), RFDs (requests for discussion), no performance review process...In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleague Steve Klabnik.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Bryan: Engineering a cultureMatt: It's Free Real EstateCliff: Who killed the network switch?OxF: Engineering CultureDemo DayJujutsuCovid as a catalyst for remote-friendly featuresWatercooler morning meetingNo-meet WednesdayOtM: Jeff RothschildNo (formalized) review processThe non-zero-sum value of praisePositive Coaching AllianceChat as the apple of discord (and remember email?! Or jabber??!!)DORAOxide RFDsRFD 68: Partnership as Shared ValuesMatthew Sanabria: Observability Companies to Watch in 2024"Chat""Rock and stone"If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Nicholas Carlini joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about his work with adversarial machine learning. He's found sequences of--seemingly random--tokens that cause LLMs to ignore their restrictions! Also: printf is Turing complete?!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Nicholas Carlini.If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Data visualization is an important--and overlooked!--tool in the software engineer's tool belt. Bryan describes a recent journey with gnuplot while Oxide colleague, Charlie Park, shares his own experience with data visualization and Adam offers a visual analysis of Simpsons episodes. Stay tuned to the end to find out about the Oxide and Friends book club coming up in May.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide Colleague, Charlie Park.(00:00) - Intro (13:39) - OODA (22:30) - Back to Bryan (24:27) - Flame Graphs (28:58) - Statemap (32:39) - Minard / Tufte (44:53) - thingskatedid (46:39) - DTrace aggregations (56:06) - ParaView (01:03:08) - Simpsons IMDb (01:05:16) - Survivorship Bias (01:15:03) - Kartlytics (01:18:15) - Kartlytics sample group (01:19:11) - Wrapping up (01:22:02) - OxF book club Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Bryan's rad gnuplotGitHub PR with Bryan's visualizationsTuftePronunciation of "Tufte" is /ˈtʌfti/Flame Graphsflamegraph-rsOODAThis American Life: A Little Bit of KnowledgeStatemapsMinard's diagramhttps://twitter.com/thingskatedid/status/1386077306381242371plot.awkVisualizing regular expressions and BNF grammars with GraphvizExample implementations of isvg and idotDTrace aggregationsRust crate ratatuiPrograms and libraries for plotting and other data visualizations:gnuplotMatplotlibggplot2ParaViewGLVisSimpsons IMDB visualizationAbraham Wald and the airplane diagram with red bullet holes – here’s the origin storyKartlyticsHow Life Works by Philip BallIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Bryan and Adam are joined by members of the Oxide storage team--Josh, Alan, James, and Matt--to talk about Crucible, the service that provides block storage for VM instances running in the Oxide Rack.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues Josh Clulow, Alan Hanson, James MacMahon, and Matt Keeter.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Hyper-converged infrastructureFibre ChannelZFSIntroduction to Flexible Data Placement: A New Era of Optimized Data ManagementStorage Architecture ConsiderationsCephRFD 60: Storage Architecture ConsiderationsRFD 177: Implementation of Data StorageRFD 444: Crucible Upstairs RefactoringRFD 445: Crucible Upstairs BackpressureIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Sometimes Bryan gets trolled by a tweet and brings it to Adam and the Oxide Friends. This was a well-crafted troll: is innovation slowing? Are the most interesting problems solved. In a word: no. For many more words, listen in!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Steve Klabnik.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:The TweetNate SilverSecularitySecular stagnationAngela Collier: physics progress in the last 70 years?Haber processCRISPR gene editingBook: Code Breaker by Walter IsaacsonLeonhard EulerDijkstra's algorithmRaftAntibioticAcquired: TSMCEUV lithographyIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Bryan and Adam are joined by Oxide colleagues Josh Clulow, Patrick Mooney, and Steve Klabnik to discuss Helios, the operating system that runs on the Oxide Rack. Helios is a distro of illumos (derived from OpenSolaris, derived from Solaris, etc.). What's a distro? Why did Oxide choose illumos? Plenty of cross-generational appeal in this episode!Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:The Helios github repoHacker News thread its releaseOmniOSRust Tier 2 supportBryan's talk on holistic bootOxide and Friends: Holistic BootOxide and Friends: Shipping Rack 1The Quality Death SpiralOxide's "St. Louis" branch of illumosBryan's sleeper bug from 1991illumos books (How's this for some SEO?!)If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

We love Rust at Oxide, but the haters aren’t wrong: builds can be slow. Bryan and Adam are joined by Sean Klein, Rain Paharia, and Steve Klabnik to discuss techniques for analyzing and accelerating Rust builds.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Sean Klein, Rain Paharia, and the illustrious Steve Klabnik.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:go forth and vibe in this minecraft paradise I seededDinosaur bookRoslyn--timingsSteve's "outlining" exampleRain's cargo-hakariRain speeding up Omicron buildsBlog post on many of these topicsSean's fix to u32 overflow bugminiserdemoldDavid Tolnay on pre-compiled macros in wasmBuck2Build Systems à la CarteIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Simon Willison joined Bryan and Adam to discuss a recent article maligning open source large language models. Simon has so much practical experience with LLMs, and brings so much clarity to what they can and can’t do. How do these systems work? How do they break? What are open and proprietary LLMs out there?Recorded 1/15/2024We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Simon Willison.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:IEEE Spectrum: Open-Source AI Is Uniquely DangerousNewsroom Robots with Simon WillisonOxF: Another LPC55 ROM VulnerabilitySimon Willison: Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023llama.cppMistral AIFrance’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round at a $260M valuation to take on OpenAISimon again: The AI trust crisisReply All: Is Facebook Spying on You?Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language ModelsNew York Times Sues OpenAILycosChatGPT Can Be Broken by Entering These Strange Words, And Nobody Is Sure WhySimon posted a follow up blog article where he explains using MacWhisper and Claude to make his LLM pull out a few of his favorite quotes from this episode:Talking about Open Source LLMs on Oxide and FriendsIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Bryan and Adam are joined by MIT Research Scientist, Michael Cafarella, for our annual predictions episode where we check in on past predictions and gaze 1-, 3-, and 6- years into the future. No surprise: there were a lot of AI-related predictions. Big surprise: many of them came from Bryan … and with unabashed optimism!Recorded 1/8/2024Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal were your hosts. Additional speakers--and predicters--are listed below with their predictions. (If you made predictions, please submit a PR to add or clarify yours)PRs needed!If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

George Cozma from Chips and Cheese and Jordan Ranous from Storage Review joined Adam, Bryan, and the Oxide Friends to discuss AMD’s recent MI300 announcement and the implications to accelerated to compute. The MI300A particularly caught our eye--CPU and GPU chiplets on in the same package! Bryan pronounced ML "the biggest thing since the spreadsheet!"... we'll see!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included George Cozma, Jordan Ranous, and :Josh Clulow.PRs to show notes are a great way to help out the show!If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Nirav Patel, CEO and founder of Framework Computer, join Bryan and Adam to talk about building a new computer company (yes! another new computer company!) focused on making laptops repairable and open. It turns out, there are a bunch of shared lessons between building a 3lb laptop and a 2,500lb cloud computer!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Nirav Patel, founder and CEO of Framework Computer.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Frameworkr/spicypillowsFramework expansion cardsFramework-based gaming console from the communityOptima Braille laptopOxide and Friends: A brief history of talking computersAcer Ferrari 3400 c. 2004 -- 6.6lb favorite of Solaris Kernel engineersIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

So… OpenAI happened… and Bryan and Adam try it break it down with help from Steve Tuck and even more special guest Chuck McManis.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by variously special guests Steve Tuck and Chuck McManis.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Hacker News: OpenAPI's board has fired Sam AltmanEmployee Letter to OpenAI's BoardWho Controls OpenAI? by Matt Levine, the G.O.A.T.Axios: Who is Larry Summers, the controversial pick to join OpenAI's boardMike Olsen: What is a Board of Directors For?Fermat's Last Theorem (an + bn = cn only possible for n = 1 or n = 2)> I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain. - FermatHomer vs. FermatIBM and the Holocaust

Bryan and Adam were joined by Gergely Orosz, the Pragmatic Engineer, to talk about Oxide's hiring process, the experiences that led to that process, and hiring generally. There's a lot there for anyone interested in hiring or being hired... and especially for anyone who's considered applying to Oxide!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Gergely Orosz.The "Litter Box" is what we call the recording studio... thus named for reasons best left to the imaginationOxide Hiring ProcessThe Pragmatic EngineerOxide and Friends: Tech Layoffs (Nov. 8, 2022)The Oxide RFD processThe Psychopath TestOxide Principles and ValuesAdam's detente with the American Hockey LeagueLeventhal's conundrum - there is a performance pathology, find the butterfly that caused the hurricane.Compensation as a Reflection of ValuesLight's Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of GEGergely's new book The Software Engineer's GuidebookIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Oxide Founder and CEO, Steve Tuck, joined Bryan, Adam, and Oxide Friend, Steve Klabnik, to talk about our recent announcements: general availability of the Oxide Cloud Computer, and raising $44m. The reception was (broadly) great! Bryan and Steve answered questions about the product, company, and launch.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Steve Tuck and Steve Klabnik.If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob joined Adam and Bryan to continue their panel discussion with Bryan following up his p99conf talk revisiting open source anti-patterns. Notably, open source has accelerated the distribution of value… without clarity on how contributors can capture that value. Has open source accelerated unequal distribution?In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by friends of the show Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Bryan's Talk, Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns: A Decade Later by Bryan Cantrill, OxideSubsequent panel with Adam J. and AshleyOxide and Friends: Open Source Anti-Patterns with Kelsey Hightower from August 28th, 2023Oxide and Friends: Docker, Inc., an Early Epitaph from September 13th, 2021If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Recently, a clip from Oxide and Friends was played by another podcast as something of a punching bag. Adam was called "uneducated" and Bryan, it was observed accurately, "hadn't used C++ since the '90s". Well, Conor Hoekstra from the ADSP pod joined us to settle the beef.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Conor Hoekstra and Oxide colleague Cliff Biffle.

Adam and the Oxide Friends follow Bryan on Mr. Nagle's Wild Ride as he investigates performance anomalies. Bryan used all manner of tool from gnuplot to DTrace-inspired bpftrace! If you have ever or plan to ever care about the latency of network-borne protocols, you won't want to miss this!We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from October 2nd, 2023.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Tom Lyon, James Tucker, Eliza Weisman, and Dan Ports.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Latency Art: X marks the spotLatency Art: Rainbow PterodactylNagle on NagleDan's tweet on NagleEliza's tweet on NagleTCP_NODELAY or TCP? No, delay!Dr. Angela Collier on violin plotsPRs needed!If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Bryan and Adam reminisce about the DTrace journey 20 years after first integrating the code into Solaris back in September 2003.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Josh Clulow.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Hungry Jack'sBryan's other online dating profileThe Sun E10000 (E10k), the world's worst routerLeventhal's ConundrumDTrace as Half-Life 3, eternal vaporwareMore on SPARC, its TLB, the %npc, and dtrace_fish from OxF May 2021Solaris 9 was the completion of the Solaris 2.0 visionDTrace Kernel Technical Discussion (2002)Mr. SparkleFirefox? Mozilla? Firebird!Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems, Usenix 2004Graydon on DTrace in RustRust USDT crateDTrace on WindowsAdam's blog: DTrace on macOSAdam's blog: DTrace for OELPSARC cases from 2003If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Kelsey Hightower joined Bryan and Adam to revisit a topic Bryan had spoken about a decade ago: corporate open source anti-patterns. Kelsey brought his typical sagacity to a complex and fraught topic.We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from August 28th, 2023.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Kelsey Hightower.Here is the (lightly edited) live chat from the show:xxxxbubbler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm8P4oCIY3g here is Bryan's talk from 1 decade ago, for referencerolipo.li: web3 is going greatrolipo.li: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ahl0003: Last time Kelsey joined us for predictionsblainehansen: "Governance orgies" happen when the governance mechanisms aren't well-designed ha. If they are well-designed then governance is good!jbk: opsware maybe? or tivoli?uptill3: hp openview was one as wellsevanj: "they've got us working for trinkets"sevanj: this was mentioned on the bugzilla anouncement regarding funded staff being pulled from working on project in the last 3 years.blainehansen: All open source problems are secretly public goods problems hahacarpetbomberz.com: Hashicorp DID do a "thing"blacksmithforlife: Just like taxes fund roads, we should have a internet usage tax that then funds these open source projects that everyone finds value in. The person taxed should get to decide which open source project gets the moneykaliszad: The problem is, you can help other people, but first you have to sustain yourself. 🙂aarondgoldman: Too boring to be evilrolipo.li: too busy to be evil?aarondgoldman: Angular never got budget even when Inbox used it and had millions of usersblainehansen: Most open source projects are probably not best led/governed by a for-profit company haaarondgoldman: HP had a huge repair service business when their hardware got much more reliable it almost killed the companygeekgonecrazy: Never actually considered using CNCF membership as a qualification for using a toolahl0003: it's the nintendo seal of quality!geekgonecrazy: It’s an interesting thought now that I’ve heard it 🙈 especially for any sort of core utility like thissaone: On the topic of patterns that seem to be working, Docker Desktop's license requiring subscriptions for larger organizations for use of their product and focusing on providing a really good developer experience seems to be a really good spot for them to begoodjanet: The term freeloading comes up only when there's a "problem" (usually fiscal in a company/group), the rest of the time the exact same actions are fine or often encouragedmrdanack: I disagree, there are freeloaders. Multi-billion companies like IBM and Oracle have benefited from the PHP project for multiple decades and really haven't contributed even a modest amount back.geekgonecrazy: Anytime hitting CLA I always use that as clue to take hesitation and think about contributing. 🙈quasarken: I love that bit about community Adamblacksmithforlife: https://www.linux.com/news/us-government-opens-access-federal-source-code-codegov/blainehansen: Sometimes a community of passionate contributors is more a burden than a gift. Every project is different, not every project can be supported by many well-paid engineers at vc-funded incentive-aligned companies. I don't think the BUSL is smart or good, but there's a funding/support problem here that legitimately needs to be solved, and the existing open source social contract hasn't solved it. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/burden-open-source-maintainerblacksmithforlife: Disclaimer: I'm a federal employee who tried to get more software open source while I was working at various agencies. For the most part it was soundly ignored and the agencies just claimed it was too hard and they didn't have enough funding to do it, which in my opinion is just falseblacksmithforlife: But, if you want it, just do a FOIA, then they have to give it to yousaone: There's a great deal of fear at my company that software being open sourced must be carefully vetted to avoid potential embarassment so the hurdles to open source anything are very highgirgias: The French government has released code which was pure garbage, and I don't think one can do worse than the APB codegeekgonecrazy: That sucks. 😬I can totally see individual developers being afraid. I’ve faced that with my team. Weird to think org would be especially if trusting engineersnorthrup: Adam to your point though - I don't see how that's any different than other open source projects that aren't corporate backed. No open source projected is obligated to honor your issue to drive a project in a direction, or accept your PR to add a feature or function...ahl0003: Great point!blainehansen: The open source cooperative idea is the best I can come up with to solve the problemblacksmithforlife: What is dev rail?bcantrill: Developer relationsahl0003: developer relationsjbk: dev rel(ations)?bcantrill: JYNXblacksmith

On August 10th, HashiCorp made the controversial decision to re-license some of the popular, formerly-open source project under the Business Source License (BUSL). Bryan and Adam spoke with founders of the OpenTF project, an effort to keep Terraform operating in the open.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on August 21st included Josh Padnick, Malcolm Matalka, and Cory O'Daniel.Our condolences to the friends, family, and loved ones of Kris NóvaOminous figure squeezing a fish that is vomiting gold coinsSome of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:OpenTFHashiCorp BUSL announcementHashiCorp BUSL FAQSqueezefish "Interview" (image)Cory's blog postCNCF issue for tracking Hashicorp license changeIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Bryan and Steve Klabnik discuss Fred Brooks' essay "No Silver Bullets"--ostensibly apropos of nothing!--discussing the challenges to 10x (or 100x!) improvements in software engineering.In addition to Bryan Cantrill speakers on included Steve Klabnik, Ian Grunert, and Tom Lyon.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:No Silver Bullet by Fred BrooksSub-podcasting (it's a thing!) thisvideo: Fred Brooks speaking on No Silver BulletRuby on Rails demo (2005)Future of coding podcastAmdahl's lawFizzBuzzEnterpriseEditionKnuth and McIlroy Approach a ProblemIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

In an Oxide and Friends tradition, Bryan and Adam invite the community to share book recommendations.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on included Steve Klabnik, Tom Lyon, Ian Grunert, Owen Anderson, phillipov, makowski, and saethlin. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Elon JetHigh Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems by Southwick, KarenMaking PCR: A Story of Biotechnology by Paul RabinowSun Labs vs. SunSoft Water Fight 1992Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town Hardcover by Stacy HornBuilt to Fail: The Inside Story of Blockbuster's Inevitable Bust Kindle Edition by Alan PayneA History of Silicon Valley - Vol 1: The 20th Century Paperback by Piero ScaruffiH-E-BMoby Dick by Herman Melville (Arion Press)A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky ChambersEndurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred LansingInto the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of El FaroIf Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future Hardcover by Jill LeporeUNIVAC and the 1952 Presidential ElectionNPR: The Night A Computer Predicted The Next PresidentDoom Guy: Life in First Person by John RomeroFrom Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting by Judith BrettBryan had a reading list for his wedding?! (his wife confirms)The Fatal Shore by Robert HughesHarp in the South by Ruth ParkCloudstreet by Tim WintonDeath of the Lucky Country by Donald Horne30 Days in Sydney by Peter CareyLeviathan by John BirminghamThe Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding by Robert HughesBarbarians Led by Bill Gates by Jennifer Edstrom and, Marlin EllerMurray Sargent's account of how his Scroll Screen Tracer got Windows to work in protected modeStartup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry KaplanDeviceScriptWashington: A Life by ChernowCalifornia Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--and What It Means for America's Power GridCommand and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric SchlosserThe Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard RothsteinActs of the Apostles: Mind over Matter: Volume Blue by John F.X. SundmanThunder Below!: The USS Barb Revolutionizes Submarine Warfare in World War II by Eugene B. FluckeyThinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel KahnemanThe Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory ZuckermanThe Predictors: How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street by Thomas A. BassThe Eudaemonic Pie: The Bizarre True Story of How a Band of Physicists and Computer Wizards Took On Las Vegas by Thomas A BassSome of the other books mentioned in the Discord channel:Herr aller Dinge/Lord of All Things by Andreas EschbachDebt: The First 5,000 Years by David GraeberThe Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert A. SimonCalifornia Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--and What It Means for America's Power Grid by Katherine BluntThe Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution Hardcover by Gregory ZuckermanThe Predictors: How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street by Thomas A. BassThe Eudaemonic Pie: The Bizarre True Story of How a Band of Physicists and Computer Wizards Took On Las Vegas by Thomas A BassModels.Behaving.Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life by Emanuel Derman

Bryan and Adam were joined by Justin and David from the Oxide team to talk about their work on the Oxide Console--the frontend to the Oxide computer. The rigor they've brought to all aspects of the frontend--client/server type safety, test automation, a11y--it's astounding!We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from July 17th, 2023.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues David Crespo, and Justin Bennett.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Justin's podcast: devtools.fmDavid's talk: Folding Time with Signals in ElmOxide and Friends where we mentioned ElmPlaywrightKent C. DoddsDropshot web frameworkOxide Typescript SDKOxide console repoOxide docs siteIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Bryan and Adam were joined by members of the Oxide operations team to discuss the logistics of actually assembling the first Oxide Rack, crating it, shipping it... and all the false starts, blind alleys, and failed tests along the way.We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from July 10th, 2023.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues, Kate Hicks, Kirstin Neira, CJ Mendez, Erik Anderson, Josh Clulow, Nathanael Huffman and Aaron Hartwig.If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

On this week's show, Adam Leventhal posed questions from Hacker News (mostly) to Oxide founders Bryan Cantrill and Steve Tuck. Stick around until the end to hear about the hardest parts of building Oxide--great, surprising answers from both Bryan and Steve.They were also joined by Steve Klabnik.Questions for Steve and Bryan:[@6:38] Q:Congrats to the team, but after hearing about Oxide for literal years since the beginning of the company and repeatedly reading different iterations of their landing page, I still don't know what their product actually is. It's a hypervisor host? Maybe? So I can host VMs on it? And a network switch? So I can....switch stuff? (*)A:Steve: A rack-scale computer; "A product that allows the rest of the market that runs on-premises IT access to cloud computing."Bryan: agrees[@8:46] Q:It's like an on prem AWS for devs. I don't understand the use case but the hardware is cool. (*)I didn’t understand the business opportunity of Oxide at all. Didn’t make sense to me.However if they’re aiming at the companies parachuting out of the cloud back to data centers and on prem then it makes a lot of sense.It’s possible that the price comparison is not with comparable computing devices, but simply with the 9 cents per gigabyte egress fee from major clouds. (*)A:Bryan: "Elastic infrastructure is great and shouldn't be cloistered to the public cloud"; Good reasons to run on-prem: compliance, security, risk management, latency, economics; "Once you get to a certain size, it really makes sense to own"Steve: As more things move onto the internet, need for on-prem is going to grow; you should have the freedom to own[@13:31] Q:Somebody help me understand the business value. All the tech is cool but I don't get the business model, it seems deeply impractical.You buy your own servers instead of renting, which is what most people are doing now. They argue there's a case for this, but it seems like a shrinking market. Everything has gone cloud.Even if there are lots of people who want to leave the cloud, all their data is there. That's how they get you -- it costs nothing to bring data in and a lot to transfer it out. So high cost to switch.AWS and others provide tons of other services in their clouds, which if you depend on you'll have to build out on top of Oxide. So even higher cost to switch.Even though you bought your own servers, you still have to run everything inside VMs, which introduce the sort of issues you would hope to avoid by buying your own servers! Why is this? Because they're building everything on Illumos (Solaris) which is for all practical purposes is dead outside Oxide and delivering questionable value here.Based on blogs/twitter/mastodon they have put a lot of effort into perfecting these weird EE side quests, but they're not making real new hardware (no new CPU, no new fabric, etc). I am skeptical any customers will notice or care and would have not noticed had they used off the shelf hardware/power setups.So you have to be this ultra-bizarre customer, somebody who wants their own servers, but doesn't mind VMs, doesn't need to migrate out of the cloud but wants this instead of whatever hardware they manage themselves now, who will buy a rack at a time, who doesn't need any custom hardware, and is willing to put up with whatever off-the-beaten path difficulties are going to occur because of the custom stuff they've done that's AFAICT is very low value for the customer. Who is this? Even the poster child for needing on prem, the CIA is on AWS now.I don't get it, it just seems like a bunch of geeks playing with VC money?(*)A:Bryan: "EE side quests" rant; you can't build robust, elastic infrastructure on commodity hardware at scale; "The minimum viable product is really, really big"; Example: monitoring fan power draw, tweaking reference desgins doesn't cut it Example: eliminating redundant AC power suppliesSteve: "Feels like I’m dealing with my divorced parents" post[@32:24] Q (Chat):It would be nice to see what this thing is like before having to write a big checkSteve: We are striving to have lab infrastructure available for test drives[@32:56] Q (Chat):I want to know about shipping insurance, logistics, who does the install, ...Bryan: "Next week we'll be joined by the operations team" we want to have an indepth conversation about those topics[@34:40] Q:Seems like Oxide is aiming to be the Apple of the enterprise hardware (which isn't too surprising given the background of the people involved - Sun used to be something like that as were other fully-integrated providers, though granted that Sun didn't write Unix from scratch). Almost like coming to a full circle from the days where the hardware and the software was all done in an integrated fashion before Linux turned-up and started to run on your toaster. (*)A:Bryan: We find things to emulate in both Apple and Sun, e.g., integrated hard- and software; AS/400Steve: "It's not hardware and software together for integration sake", it's re

Bryan and Adam offer a rebuttal to the AI doomerism that has been gaining volume. And--hoo-boy--this one had some range. Heaven’s Gate, ceteris paribus, WWII, derpy security robots, press-fit DIMM sockets, async Rust, etc. And optimistic as always: the hardware and systems AI doomers imagine are incredibly hard to get right; let’s see AIs help us before we worry about our own obsolescence!On this episode Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal were on a rant; but we welcome others on-stage!Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:How we got here: Tweet from Liron ShapiraComet Hale-BoppHeaven's GateCross price supply elasticity of copper and molybdenum marketsCeteris paribus -- Bryan's exit from economicsChris Dixon's book releasing in March 2024 (NOT AN ENDORSEMENT)British to American translation guide"It's not just human-level extinction... it's like potential destruction of all value in the light cone" - Emmett ShearVingian SingularityOxide and Friends: Tales from the bringup labOxide and Friends: More tales from the bringup labBullying self-driving carsAI Resistance Reservists: "For the Lightcone!"Samsung security robotsOxide and Friends: Does a GPT future need software engineers?"I for one welcome our new AI overlords"If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Greg and Rain from the Oxide team joined Bryan and Adam to talk about powerful methods of verifying software: formal methods in the form of TLA+ and property-based testing in the form of the proptest Rust crate. If you care about making software right, don't miss it!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues Greg Colombo and Rain Paharia.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Distributed SagasSteno -- Oxide's implementation of distributed sagasLearn TLA+Hillel Wayne talksHillel Wayne on Alloy 6Quickcheck Paper (2000)Proptest docsRain's example codeuse proptest::prelude::*; use proptest::collection::vec; proptest! { #[test] fn proptest_my_sort_pairs(input in vec(any::<u64>(), 0..128)) { let output = my_sort(input); for window in output.windows(2) { assert!(window[0] <= window[1]); } } #[test] fn proptest_my_sort_against_bubble_sort(input in vec(any::<u64>(), 0..128)) { let output = my_sort(input.clone()); let bubble_output = bubble_sort(input); assert_eq!(output, bubble_output); } // These proptests implicitly check that my_sort doesn't crash. }buf-list crateguppy crate... and stay tuned for an upcoming episode revisiting async/await in RustIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!