Shows / Oxide and Friends
Oxide and Friends
Oxide hosts a weekly Discord show where we discuss a wide range of topics: computer history, startups, Oxide hardware bringup, and other topics du jour. These are the recordings in podcast form. Join us live (usually Mondays at 5pm PT) https://discord.gg/gcQxNHAKCB Subscribe to our calendar: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/c_318925f4185aa71c4524d0d6127f31058c9e21f29f017d48a0fca6f564969cd0%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
Episodes
Oxide and FriendsOxF 2024 Wrap-Up
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…
Oxide and FriendsScaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
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…
Oxide and FriendsConferences in Tech
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…
Oxide and FriendsIntel after Gelsinger
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…
Oxide and FriendsTechnical Blogging
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…
Oxide and FriendsBooks in the Box IV
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…
Oxide and FriendsUnshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
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…
Oxide and FriendsQuerying Metrics with OxQL
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…
Oxide and FriendsRTO or GTFO
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…
Oxide and FriendsReflecting on Founder Mode
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…
Oxide and FriendsRFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
RFDs--Requests for Discussion--are how we at Oxide discuss... just about everything! Technical design, hardware component selection, changes in process…
Oxide and FriendsWhither CockroachDB?
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…
Oxide and FriendsThe Saga of Sagas
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…
Oxide and FriendsPragmatic LLM usage with Nicholas Carlini
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…
Oxide and FriendsCrowdStrike BSOD Fiasco with Katie Moussouris
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…
Oxide and FriendsHeterogeneous Computing with Raja Koduri
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…
Oxide and FriendsInnovation Tokens with Charity Majors
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…
Oxide and FriendsIs NVIDIA like Sun from the Dot Com Bubble?
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…
Oxide and FriendsMusing with Changelog's Adam Stacoviak
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!…
Oxide and FriendsRebooting a datacenter: A decade later
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…
Oxide and FriendsBookclub: How Life Works by Philip Ball
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…
Oxide and FriendsAll we have to fear is FUD itself
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…
Oxide and FriendsA Baseball Startup with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel
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…
Oxide and FriendsDiscovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres Freund
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…
Oxide and FriendsCultural Idiosyncrasies
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!…
Oxide and FriendsAdversarial Machine Learning
Nicholas Carlini joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about his work with adversarial machine learning. He's found sequences of--seemingly…
Oxide and FriendsData Visualization
Data visualization is an important--and overlooked!--tool in the software engineer's tool belt. Bryan describes a recent journey with gnuplot while Oxide…
Oxide and FriendsCrucible: The Oxide Storage Service
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…
Oxide and FriendsInnovation Stagnation?
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…
Oxide and FriendsHelios
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…
Oxide and FriendsWhat's taking so long?!
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…
Oxide and FriendsOpen Source LLMs with Simon Willison
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…
Oxide and FriendsPredictions 2024!
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-…
- Oxide and Friends
AMD's MI300 and the Future of Accelerated Compute
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…
- Oxide and Friends
Framework Computer with Nirav Patel
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!)…
- Oxide and Friends
OpenAI's Boardroom Brawl
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…
- Oxide and Friends
Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz
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…
- Oxide and Friends
Launching the Cloud Computer
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 and Friends
Open Source and Capitalism with Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob
Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob joined Adam and Bryan to continue their panel discussion with Bryan following up his p99conf talk revisiting open source…
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Settling Beef
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…
- Oxide and Friends
Mr. Nagle's Wild Ride
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…
Oxide and FriendsDTrace at 20
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…
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Open Source Anti-Patterns with Kelsey Hightower
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…
Oxide and FriendsFork in the road for Terraform?
On August 10th, HashiCorp made the controversial decision to re-license some of the popular, formerly-open source project under the Business Source License…
- Oxide and Friends
No Silver Bullets
Bryan and Steve Klabnik discuss Fred Brooks' essay "No Silver Bullets"--ostensibly apropos of nothing!--discussing the challenges to 10x (or 100x!)…
- Oxide and Friends
Books in the Box III
In an Oxide and Friends tradition, Bryan and Adam invite the community to share book recommendations. In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal…
- Oxide and Friends
The Frontend of the Computer
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…
- Oxide and Friends
Tales from Manufacturing: Shipping Rack 1
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…
Oxide and FriendsShipping the first Oxide rack: Your questions answered!
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…
- Oxide and Friends
Okay, Doomer: A Rebuttal to AI Doom-mongering
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…
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Software Verificationpalooza
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…
- Oxide and Friends
Virtualizing Time
Jordan Hendricks joined Bryan and Adam to talk about her work virtualizing time--particularly challenging when migrating virtual machines from one physical…
- Oxide and Friends
Open Source Governance
Bryan and Adam are joined by Ashley Williams to talk about open source governance... and the recently, and various stumblings of the Rust project leadership.
- Oxide and Friends
Building Together: Oxide and Samtec
Bryan and Adam are joined by Jonathan and Jignesh from Samtec to discuss working together to build the Oxide Rack. We've all seen bad vendors--what does it…
- Oxide and Friends
The Network Behind the Network
Bryan and Adam are joined by Oxide colleagues Arjen, Matt, John, and Nathaneal to talk about the management network--the brainstem of the Oxide Rack. Just as…
- Oxide and Friends
Blue Skies Over Mastodon (with Erin Kissane and Tim Bray)
Erin Kissane joins Bryan and Adam to talk the new social network "Bluesky" through the lens of her blog post "Blue Skies Over Mastodon". Long-time friends of…
- Oxide and Friends
Rust Trademark: Argle-bargle or Foofaraw?
The Rust Foundation caused a fracas with their proposed new trademark rules. Bryan and Adam were lucky enough to be joined by Ashley Williams, Adam Jacob, and…
Oxide and FriendsCabling the Backplane
Bryan and Adam are joined by Doug Wibben and Robert Keith to talk about the mechanical design of the cabled backplane of the Oxide rack that allows for…
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Get You a State Machine for Great Good
Andrew Stone of Oxide Engineering joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about his purpose-built, replay debugger for the Oxide setup textual UI…
- Oxide and Friends
Does a GPT future need software engineers?
Bryan and Adam and the Oxide Friends take on GPT and its implications for software engineering. Many aspiring programmers are concerned that the future of the…