Oxide and Friends

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Technical Blogging Nov 21, 2024

Show notes

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 Developers
- 50% off (!) with code OXIDE50
ongoing by Tim Bray
Tim Bray on blogs.sun.com
Scobleizer
Bryan: Blogging through the decades
Bryan: Remembering Charles Beeler
Adam: APFS in Detail: Conclusions
Beastie Boys Book: Live & Direct
Adam: AWS Outposts by the Numbers: A Far-Too-Deep Dive Into Pricing
Adam: I Love Go; I Hate Go
Adam: I am not a resource
Adam: First Rust Program Pain (So you can avoid it...)
Bryan: Falling in love with Rust
Adam: On Blogging (Briefly)
Bryan: The Power of a Pronoun
Adam: DTrace "Scobleized"

Appendix: Cool Technical Blogs

Crowdsourced by the Oxide Friends:

Nova - in the writer's words, "a JavaScript apologist's exploration of how JavaScript could be good"
The Pragmatic Engineer
TigerBeetle
Faster 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 Ride
Hillel 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 boats

Bonus technical articles from chat and beyond:

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!

Books in the Box IV Nov 01, 2024

Show notes

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 Xamot

Recommendations:

Bonus recommendations from chat

Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino) Oct 16, 2024

Show notes

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 Launched
End of the Road: An Anandtech Farewell
Centaur Technology
AVX-512
Zen5's AVX512 Teardown + More...
Thermal Power Design (TDP)
OxF: Rack Scale Networking (use of p4)
P4
AGESA
OxF: The Network Behind the Network (Oxide server recovery)
openSIL
phoronix: openSIL
PCB backdrilling
OxF: AMD's MI300 (APUs)
dtrace.conf(24) -- The DTrace unconference, December 11th, 2024

Querying Metrics with OxQL Oct 02, 2024

Show notes

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:

RTO or GTFO Sep 26, 2024

Show notes

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:

Reflecting on Founder Mode Sep 20, 2024

Show notes

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 Mode
Bryan Reflecting on Founder Mode
Tim O'Reilly How I Failed
Camille Fournier Founder Create Managers
Bryan Chesky interview we mention
OxF: on Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing
Seagull Management
How to Castrate a Bull NOT AN ENDORSEMENT; DO NOT READ
The ego con: Non-Stop Hitz

RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide Aug 30, 2024

Show notes

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, Germany
Oxide RFD site
RFD 1: Requests for Discussion
A Tool for Discussion (Oxide blog post from Ben)
Sun PSARC cases
The Queen's Duck
The Hairy Arm
Joyent RFDs
RFC-3
AsciiDoc
Joyent RFD 77
OxF: Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz
Oxide 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 RFDs

Whither CockroachDB? Aug 21, 2024

Show notes

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:

The Saga of Sagas Aug 14, 2024

Show notes

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 McCaffrey
Oxide RFD 107: Workflows Engine
Steno
chat: "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 paper
chat: "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 testing
Oxide RFD 289: Steno Upgrade
Feral Concurrency Control paper from Berkeley and the University of Sydney
Eliza's PR
Steno's description of its divergence from Distributed Sagas
AWS "constant work" blog
chat: "Now, migrate the owl."
OxF on formal methods
A complex bug with sagas: "tl;dr there's TWENTY steps in 5042 that leads to an accounting bug"
Oxide RFD 373: Reliable Persistent Workflows
Eliza's novella on updating an instance

Pragmatic LLM usage with Nicholas Carlini Aug 09, 2024

Show notes

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:

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