Ben Leonard
Appearances
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
So spot on. In particular, just encouraging people to get over the hump of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just write the thing down. Doesn't need to be perfect. Better written, better sent. Let other people work on it. Love that sentiment.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
I am really excited for this. Me too. This feels like another long time coming kind of episode.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
We were using, at Delphix, we had a sort of similar system. I mean, born of some similar problems. When I joined Delphix, the problem I saw was that like everyone in engineering was very clear on what they thought we should do. And everyone's idea was different and everyone felt ignored, but ignored without having really raised the issue.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
So we started a process fairly similar to, to let people express those ideas, express, you know, why they thought we should do them, that kind of stuff. And yeah, kind of have their day in court as part of a group discussion.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
So it was somewhere between what you're describing at Joyent and a little bit of the PSAR case without some of the rigmarole and like council of elders, but more focused on product discussions. But yeah, what we did was mostly in Google Docs, which I think has some downsides in particular what you're alluding to about like,
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
the lack of searchability and there we like layered additional indexing on top of it and like a meta document to keep track of everything. But then some benefits too, like it's much easier to have multiple authors simultaneously. Yes.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
But I think it's fair to say that we're weird for our obsession with ASCII doc. Is that right? I think so.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
I haven't looked at the numbers for like years, but even then it was overwhelming.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Mr. I read the comments in social media. we are talking about oxide requests for discussion, which is, you know, we were talking about what to name this episode and you stumbled onto, I think the backbone of oxide. And that is just so spot on.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Well, on that, some of that was learned from what we had done at Delphix, which was that you weren't, you were, maybe you weren't allowed, but you were certainly highly encouraged to have a co-author. Like we kind of didn't want solo authors and things. And part of the reason for that was we thought it made for stronger documents.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
We thought that even if it was somebody's deep held idea, having a co-author to walk them through it and convince them of it and get them on board would strengthen the quality of the document. I'm sure many of my collaborators on those RFDs would also hasten to point out that I like to do a half-assed job and then leave the rest to them. But I prefer to think of it as cross-pollination as well.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
So I would also say, folks who are wondering, when someone joins Oxide, then what? Do you just spend the first three years reading? Good question. I think, and Brian, you probably have the data on this, I feel like we're on escape velocity. I feel like it is impossible for me to read every RFD that is being produced, even if I dedicated...
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
It is the mechanism by which we make all kinds of decisions, decisions about the product, about the company, the way we articulate ideas, articulate research is really the durable entity that has been with Oxide from very, very early on.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Well, for Woodsworth, I had not heard of ASCII doc before joining Oxide. So I had to become a convert in a hurry.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
I feel on Google docs. One of the, I mean, huge downsides is like, you can have a great discussion in a comment or whatever. And someone closes that comment and it's like gone forever. And I think one of the benefits of, of the GitHub history is like, it's not gone forever. It's all there. Just hard to find.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Yeah. I mean, this actually started, I think the first one was the out of box experience stuff, which we kept on stumbling into. Oh yeah. When we first do the installation, we've got to do this. Or when, when we do the install, we got to remember to bring, you know, the tech screwdriver or whatever. And we just wanted somewhere to dump this stuff down.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
I mean, in part because RFD is the only durable place we have for this stuff.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
That's like, that's, that's great. I mean, much better for everyone that they figured out before they joined rather than three months in.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
In fact, the longer they live, I think is what you're getting at. Some of these ones that we wrote ages and ages ago have become really essential to understand where we were, which is not to diminish the value of the ones that we're still writing, but it's really proving its value as we look back and as these things age.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Element? You know, formerly known as Riot? You know, the chat system that I assume everyone uses. It's like, no, it's just us.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
So, um, but if we may, well, if I may, if, well, uh, so I want to get in the history, but I, I, a quick quiz question for you. Cause I was looking back at RFD one, RFD one describes the RFD process. Yes. Uh, do you, do you, do you know when that was written? Because obviously it was very early in the company's history. Would you want to guess on when that was?
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Yeah, so super proud. I would say that Augustus is the only, to my knowledge, other consumer of the Progenitor-generated CLIs, which are pretty gross. So I feel proud and filled with shame.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
You should feel no shame, Adam. Oh, it's awesome. There's a function in there whose name is XXX. So there is some reason for shame. I am very proud.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
The company started on September 9th, 2019. So the commit message was October 18th, 2019. So maybe you're waiting for a corporation.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
There you go. Certainly before money was in the bank or lots of other stuff. But it was like, you've got to be one of the first things you did.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
But like RFDs turned out to be our strategic weirdness. Like we didn't even know what they were going to be. Like we didn't envision them as like a way to communicate with the public, for example, as you mentioned that we did around.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Yeah. I mean, but I just mean like if we had, if we had used some off the shelf tool, it might've been great, but then we wouldn't, we would have struggled to do some of these other things with it. And well, I mean the work that our colleagues who have just been talking about it, like it's not a small amount of work. It's also been hugely valuable.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
And I'm not sure we would have made some different decision even knowing how much work was going to be involved.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
I'll tell you, the nice thing about it is you can also tune out for those ones that you know are going to go nowhere, which is how I've viewed the one on chat. So I've yet to read those hot comments, but now I'll go check them out. Please don't. Please don't.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
I mean, it's great for depositions. Great for discovery.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Earlier on, Chad had a question about are these really requests for discussion or are they just things that have already been discussed and decided? And very much they are requests for discussion. They're ideas that often have one or a couple of people have seen them. and then we're casting it open to other folks.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
And I think, Brian, one of the things you mentioned is often that discussion happens in the GitHub comments, but it doesn't always have to happen that way. As things are getting spicy or as things are not resolving, sometimes people have a meeting, sometimes people have it in a live chat. There are other ways of bringing discussion to determinations.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
And there's not like one prescriptive method for doing that or for navigating a conversation or even for knowing the threshold for when, okay, it's time to move on. We've published the thing. We just kind of feel it out and do what feels right for each one.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Um, no, I agree there. I think there've been very few RFDs that really are trying to draw a very firm line that we then feel a decent tip. Like I think you're, you're spot on there that, that either we go back and we update it or we create a new RFD and say, uh, you know, this, this obsolete, it's this old RFD or our thinking on this has changed or the facts have changed in these ways.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
And that's what, what changes these determinations. Um, But no, I think it's been purely valuable in terms of determination process and then hugely valuable for looking back historically and understanding, especially before we change some of these ideas, seeing that full discussion, really embracing that before we decide to go some other path.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Yeah. And so, yeah, but instead you got the oxide office, which is barely heated, but that's a, that's a subject of a, of a different podcast.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
One of my favorite efforts that Robert undertook was to build a whole graphical representation of the interlock of about a couple dozen RFDs, it felt like. Oh, yeah. Orienting you in space. It felt like a tough thing to maintain, but man, was that helpful.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Even you, Germany, and we're sorry again. Exactly. Who could ask for anything more?
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
It's so interesting to hear you say that because I felt like at the time, Uh, I'm not sure I remember it the same way. Like I remember there was certainly parts of it that were valuable and parts of it, which felt like a trip to like the DMV or like global entry.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
It was very much this body of senior engineers, air quotes around that, but folks who had been doing this for a while and felt like they were the parole board of what could be and what could not be. It was.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Oh, and there's, there's a lot of that too, where it was like, I don't know, you would kind of work, work these folks a little bit beforehand, you know, the politics of it was, was onerous.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Or even better, even if you've already decided, whether you're equivocating or not, it's something that doesn't matter, but is a delightful shed for them to discuss the color of.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
It was literally a single text file under RCS control. RCS control, sir.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Okay. Yeah. I know another very European thing. When I was going through airport security in Germany, they pulled out this microphone and wanted to have a chat about microphones. Are they, are they listeners to the pod? Are they like, now they are. I, I, I'm just one person at a time. We'd be like, even to baseball one. Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
And every bug had to be summarized on a single line of text, ideally within 80 columns. Yes. Anyway.