By all accounts, Pat Gelsinger is affable, technically sharp, hard-working, and decent. Those who have worked for him praise him as a singularly good manager. In January 2021, when Gelsinger was abruptly named the CEO of Intel, this is more or less all I knew of him — and I found myself urgently needing to learn much more. To understand my...
Sometime in late 2007, we had the idea of a DTrace conference. Or really, more of a meetup; from the primordial e-mail I sent: The goal here, by the way, is not a DTrace user group, but more of a face-to-face meeting with people actively involved in DTrace — either by porting it to another system, by integrating probes into higher level...
Over the summer, I hit an anniversary of sorts: I’ve been blogging for two decades (!). For reasons I’ll get to, I’ve been reflecting back on my history of writing in general and blogging in particular. In 2004, blogging wasn’t exactly new (it had been around in one form or another for as long as a decade), but it also wasn’t something that I...
Note: This was co-authored with Steve Tuck, and originally appeared on the Oxide blog. We are heartbroken to relay that Charles Beeler, a friend and early investor in Oxide, passed away in September after a battle with cancer. We lost Charles far too soon; he had a tremendous influence on the careers of us both. Our relationship with Charles...
Paul Graham’s Founder Mode is an important piece, and you should read it if for no other reason that “founder mode” will surely enter the lexicon (and as Graham grimly predicts: “as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it”). When building a company, founders are engaged in several different acts at...
We ran into an interesting issue recently. On the one hand, it was routine: we had a bug — a regression — and the team quickly jumped on it, getting it root caused and fixed. But on the other, this particular issue was something of an Oxide object lesson, representative not just of the technologies but also of the culture we have built here. I...
Years ago, Jeff Bezos famously quipped that "your margin is my opportunity." This was of course aimed not at Amazon’s customers, but rather its competitors, and it was deadly serious: customers of AWS in those bygone years will fondly remember that every re:Invent brought with it another round of price cuts. This era did not merely reflect...
I (finally) read Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust, and I can’t recommend it strongly enough. This book had been on my queue for years, and I put it off for the same reason that you have probably put it off: we don’t like to confront difficult things. But the book is superlative: not only is it fascinating and well-researched but given the...
“It’s been worse for me than for you.” These extraordinary words came out of the mouth of John Fisher, incompetent owner of the Oakland Athletics, on the eve of getting approval from Major League Baseball to rip its roots out of the East Bay. I have been reflecting a lot on these words. Strictly from a public relations point of view, they are...
Today we are announcing the general availability of the world’s first commercial cloud computer — along with our $44M Series A financing. From the outset at Oxide, and as I outlined in my 2020 Stanford talk, we have had three core beliefs as a company: Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure. The computer that runs the cloud...
One of the most persistent cycles in the history of computing is the oscillation between centralization and decentralization. This cycle becomes entrenched because each has distinct advantages and disadvantages: centralized solutions often yield better economies of scale, allowing for higher quality artifacts – but they can also easily become...
I, like many people, have a complicated relationship with Twitter. As Adam and I regaled in a recent Twitter Space, it started when debugging the Twitter fail whale in the offices of Obvious in 2007, where I became thoroughly unimpressed with their self-important skipper, Jack Dorsey. In part because I thought he was such a fool, I refused to...
When we started Oxide, we knew we were going to take a fresh look at the entire system. We knew, for example, that we wanted to have a true hardware root of trust and that we wanted to revisit the traditional BMC. We knew, too, that we would have our own system software on each of these embedded systems, and assumed that we would use an existing...
As a kid, I listened to a lot of talk radio. This was in the 80s, before the internet – and before the AM dial became fringe. I have fond memories of falling asleep to the likes of Bruce Williams who just gave damned good, level-headed advice. It was, at essence, both optimistic and temperate: a cool head to help people work through a tough spot....
Compensation: the word alone is enough to trigger a fight-or-flight reaction in many. But we in technology have the good fortune of being in a well-compensated domain, so why does this issue induce such anxiety when our basic needs are clearly covered? If it needs to be said, it’s because compensation isn’t merely about the currency we redeem in...
Two years ago, I had a blog entry describing falling in love with Rust. Of course, a relationship with a technology is like any other relationship: as novelty and infatuation wears off, it can get on a longer term (and often more realistic and subdued) footing – or it can begin to fray. So well one might ask: how is Rust after the honeymoon? By...
On Sunday afternoon, I was on the phone with one of my Oxide co-founders, Steve Tuck. He and I were both trying to grapple with the brazen state-sponsored violence that we were witnessing: the murder of George Floyd and the widespread, brutal, and shameless suppression of those who were demonstrating against it. Specifically, we were struggling...
We were deeply saddened to learn that Khaled Bichara, one of Oxide’s angel investors, died in a car accident in Cairo on Friday night. Those of us who have known Khaled for years have known him to be a bold investor who appreciated hard technical problems – and also a profoundly decent person, who cared deeply for his family, his companies, and...
Over the summer, I described preparing for my next expedition. I’m thrilled to announce that the expedition is now plotted, the funds are raised, and the bags are packed: together with Steve Tuck and Jess Frazelle, we have started Oxide Computer Company. Starting a computer company may sound crazy (and you would certainly be forgiven a...
When I was first interviewing with Joyent in July 2010, I recall telling then-CTO Mark Mayo that I was trying to make a decision for the next seven years of my career. Mark nodded sagely at this, assuring me that Joyent was the right move. Shortly after coming to Joyent, I became amazed that Mark had managed to keep a straight face during our...
Long ago as an undergraduate, I found myself back home on a break from school, bored and with eyes wandering idly across a family bookshelf. At school, I had started to find a calling in computing systems, and now in the den, an old book suddenly caught my eye: Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. Taking it off the shelf, the book grabbed me...
There was a tremendous amount of reaction to and discussion about my blog entry on the midlife crisis in open source. As part of this discussion on HN, Jay Kreps of Confluent took the time to write a detailed response – which he shortly thereafter elevated into a blog entry. Let me be clear that I hold Jay in high regard, as both a software...