Oxide and Friends

Special guest Conor Hoekstra from the ADSP pod joins Oxide and colleague Cliff Biffle to settle podcast beef. The hosts discuss their experiences at an open source firmware conference, probabilities and flipping coins, title consultancy and gen z slang, programming language preferences, experiences with compiler bugs, the importance of backward compatibility in C++, fear in programming communities, and challenges with manipulating and deleting objects.

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!

Guest Josh Clulow joins the podcast hosts, Bryan and Adam, to discuss the 20-year journey of DTrace. They reminisce about stress and deadlines during integration, reflect on the release of Solaris 9, and discuss the development process of DTrace. They also touch on naming conventions, improvements in boot time, and the positive impact of their technology. Other topics include developing meaningful instrumentation for Java, using DTrace for storage performance analysis, and the significance of CVEs and USDT in tracing.

Kelsey Hightower, an expert in corporate open source anti-patterns, joins the podcast to discuss the challenges faced by companies in utilizing open source tools. The speakers also explore the evolution of the open source community, the importance of project governance and copyright assignment, the role of first-class APIs, and the significance of developer advocacy in the software industry.

Speakers on August 21st discuss HashiCorp's controversial license change, disappointment among the Terraform community, BSL code concerns, and collaboration challenges in the Alumos Project. Excitement surrounds the manifesto with strong support and grassroots enthusiasm.

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 required to deliver what the customer wants; "You can't control that experience when you only do half the equation"[@42:38] Q:I truly and honestly hope you succeed. I know for certain that the market for on-prem will remain large for certain sectors for the forseeable future. However. The kind of customer who spends this type of money can be conservative. They already have to go with on an unknown vendor, and rely on unknown hardware. Then they end up with a hypervisor virtually no one else in the same market segment uses.Would you say that KVM or ESXi would be an easier or harder sell here?Innovation budget can be a useful concept. And I'm afraid it's being stretched a lot. (*)A:Bryan: We can deliver more value with our own hypervisor; we've had a lot of experience in that domain from Joyent. There are a lot of reasons that VMware et al. are not popular with their own customers; Intel vs. AMDSteve: "We think it's super important that we're very transparent with what we're building"[@56:05] Q:what is the interface I get when I turn this $$$ computer on? What is the zero to first value when I buy this hardware? (*)A:Steve: "You roll the rack in, you have to give it power, and you have give it networking [...] and you are then off on starting the software experience"; Large pool of infrastructure reosources for customers/devs/SREs/... in a day or less; Similar experience to public cloud providers[@01:02:06] Q:One of my concerns when buying a complete so...