Blogging through the decades

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...

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...