Oxide Computer Company

Big things been going on in my life lately. After 5 years with H-E-B I've moved onto new, exciting challenges. I've joined Oxide Computer Company as a Support Engineer. By coincidence my first week is the same week as Oxides yearly conference, OxCon, which has afforded me the unique opportunity to meet a large portion of my peers in person on my first day, rare for a largely remote company. It's been wildly fun first day and I'm eager to see what the rest of the week holds for us. If you've talked to me about career growth and goals over the last few years you've likely heard me expound at length about my desire to end up at Oxide someday. It's surreal having that dream become reality and I'm so grateful for the opportunity.

Spending my week at my first OxCon, Oxide Computer Company's yearly gathering. This company is beyond incredible. The actual care this company shows, coupled with superhuman rigor, is beyond anything I've ever experienced. Everything about Oxide is a kickass experience and I'm so happy to be part of it. Thank you Bryan Cantrill and Steve Tuck for building something amazing!

Nice to see Oxide Computer Company supporting Windows. I was actually using Windows for a few years before I joined, and I remember Bryan Cantrill being shocked that Hubris needed such a small diff to build on it, given that back then basically no devs used Windows internally and it wasn't an active consideration to support Windows as a host for building. Just shows you how awesome of cross-platform Rust support has. This is of course about running VMs on Oxide rather than dev machines, and that's of course important to the business. Many people in the UNIX world under-estimate how much Windows is out there, even in the server space.

We have the whole Oxide Computer Company team coming to Emeryville this week for our annual OxCon meetup. For a remote company, an in-person meeting is uniquely energizing, and in preparation for that, we made some t-shirts featuring Oxide logos that are an homage to past computer companies. Thanks to our designer extraordinaire, Ben Leonard, all of these homage shirts are amazing -- but one of them was simply too hot to leave as a surprise... Unsurprisingly, the shirt stirred up a bunch of nostalgia for Sun Microsystems. Much of the fondness for Sun has been earned: Oxide's mission comes directly from Scott McNealy's epitaph for Sun -- and Scott's reflection that over 28 years he "never had to hide the newspaper in shame from my children" remains words that all companies should live by. But the nostalgia can also become suffocating -- to the point where folks that post-date Sun may reasonably demand to hear what Sun did wrong. And of course, Sun did plenty wrong; while I was never ashamed to work for Sun, I was not infrequently embarrassed by the stuff we screwed up. Every Sun employee will have their own perspective on what Sun got wrong, and I talked about my own view in a Hacker News comment in 2011. I stand by that analysis, but another 15 years on (!), I would probably distill things even further: Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business. The detail behind this -- and how I came to viscerally feel this -- is both gutting and consequential, as it represents not merely the end of Sun but also the headwaters for Oxide. More from me on what Sun got wrong: https://lnkd.in/dPTtnGfU

I am neither an Oxide operator nor a Windows operator, but I still really enjoyed going through Oxide Computer Company's "Windows Instances" documentation as a little Friday fun. https://lnkd.in/gaAsv7Ur Documenting Windows is hard, and if your not Windows native, the tooling is really hard to grok. This page does a great job conveying a lot of really dense but niche context quickly. The Github repo associated with it is also a really neat packaging of working references and glue https://lnkd.in/gvPEJHZn I also loved the surprise of seeing the Cloudbase Solutions glue included, I don't know that anyone has done better work in the cloud community for Windows than Cloudbase. I love Friday documentation time. Also when will MS just bundle virtio into its default drivers already? Get with the times ya'll goodness.

Who are the most notable absentees from the Gartner Server Virtualization MQ? Oxide Computer Company Google Cloud (CTOA Customer) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Oxide doesn't have a hybrid cloud story. It's a private cloud play delivering the underlay for K8S-type solutions. As a CTO/EA, we depend on Gartner to surface visionaries that solve problems we have today and tomorrow. Excluding Oxide feels like a gap. At some point, I'll convince the fine folks at Oxide to sponsor some CTO Advisor content to get some practitioner attention for the problem the MQ is intended to address. Google Cloud has a legitimate story with its sovereign cloud capabilities. If hybrid cloud management is a consideration, and you have solutions such as Platform9, I'm curious as to why Google and AWS aren't in the mix.

Oxide and Friends: “For Want of a Resistor” is now live! Listen to the full episode wherever you stream your podcasts: https://buff.ly/vXQUQvf

Last week, the fears of AI-induced extinction -- an outlandish but persistent fear that has smoldered for years in various tech circles -- leapt its Silicon Valley containment, becoming a mainstream conflagration. I -- like many, I presume -- had family hitting me up over the weekend: "Should I be worried about extinction?!" The short answer is no, of course, but I felt that there a longer exploration was merited into the contagion of fear: https://lnkd.in/gJSWCk6p

How am I going to get this thing home… See what the Oxide Computer Company rack looks like in your space- https://lnkd.in/gu3S7JnF