Oxide and Friends

Bryan and Adam look back on the year of Oxide and Friends episodes, reflecting on favorite shows, moments, and (at length) cover images. Your hosts were Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal . Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them: Oxide and Friends 2024 in Images OxF: Musing With Changelog's Adam Stacoviak OxF: I know this! OxF: What's taking so long? XKCD: Dependency OxF: Disco...

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 gu...

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 liv...

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 t...

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...

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 Recommendation...

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 , a...

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 h...

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...

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 h...

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...

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 spe...

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...

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, Nichola...

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 somethin...

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 t...

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 ....

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 t...

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 Changelog Changelog: 23 years of Ruby with Matz SWOT Bachmanity Insani...

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 recordin...

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 t...

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 u...

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 Freedm...

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 u...

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...