Oxide and Friends

Oxide and Friends

Oxide Computer Company

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.

1 hour 34 minutes

Books 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 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
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!
1 November 2024, 2:00 pm
1 hour 53 minutes

Unshrouding 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 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
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!
16 October 2024, 2:00 pm
1 hour 35 minutes

Querying 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 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:
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!
2 October 2024, 2:00 pm
1 hour 39 minutes

RTO 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 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:
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!
26 September 2024, 2:00 pm
1 hour 22 minutes

Reflecting 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 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
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!
20 September 2024, 2:00 pm
1 hour 42 minutes

RFDs: 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, 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
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!
30 August 2024, 2:27 pm
1 hour 34 minutes

Whither 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 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:
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!
21 August 2024, 2:00 pm
1 hour 57 minutes

The 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 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
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!
14 August 2024, 2:00 pm
1 hour 33 minutes

Pragmatic 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 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:
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!
9 August 2024, 2:11 pm
1 hour 41 minutes

CrowdStrike 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 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!
25 July 2024, 2:00 pm
1 hour 54 minutes

Heterogeneous 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 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:
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!
18 July 2024, 2:00 pm
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