Oxide and Friends
Episodes
Death by Uptime
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We hit a new (and disturbing!) failure mode recently when a production rack that had been up for several months saw every (!) compute sled's service p...
Grown-up ZFS Data Corruption Bug
26 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Hey hey! We recently tripped over a ZFS data corruption bug–introduced over 18 years ago! Bryan and Adam discuss with members of the Oxide team as w...
Founder vs. Investor with Liz Zalman and Jerry Neumann
22 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Oxide founders, Bryan and Steve, as well as Oxide investor, Seth Winterroth, were joined by Liz Zalman and Jerry Neumann, authors of the book Founder ...
Futurelock
07 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We're big users of async Rust at Oxide, and recently we found (another) very odd and hard to debug pathology related to async Rust that we dubbed "Fut...
Books in the Box V
31 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Revisiting an annual tradition--Books in the Box! Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends share book recommendations (and--sometimes--anti-recommendations)...
AI in Higher Education with Michael Littman
17 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
LLMs have had a dramatic impact on education. There are obvious reasons for concern, but what about the less obvious opportunities afforded by LLMs? B...
Systems Software in the Large
25 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dave Pacheco is leading Oxide's multi-year effort around full-system update. He recently gave a talk about his experience leading that project, the co...
Scaling Manufacturing
19 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam were joined by members of the Oxide manufacturing team to talk about all that goes into ramping up production, from people and processe...
Technological Revolutions with Jerry Neumann
18 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jerry Neumann joined Bryan and Adam to discuss his blog post from 2015, examining the work of Carlota Perez on technological revolutions. These waves ...
The Promises of Tech with Scott Hanselman
15 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Scott Hanselman gave a terrific talk about the promises of tech: connection, convenience and creativity. Did it deliver? Scott joins Bryan and Adam to...
Oxide's $100M Series B
09 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Oxide raised its $100M Series B round of venture capital. Oxide's founders, Bryan and Steve, answer questions selected by Adam from social media about...
Adventures in Data Corruption
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Two years ago, the Oxide team encountered data corruption during a fairly simple network data transfer. The ensuing debugging sessions uncovered a tru...
When Async Attacks!
27 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when the Oxide API is slow? A podcast episode! More specifically, one about how the team employed all manner of debugging techniques to t...
Diving In with Robert Bogart
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On the heels of Bryan's blog post about the similarities between aspiring college athletes finding a team and entrepreneurs raising a round of capital...
Debugger-Driven Development
16 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Building systems software can be quite opaque, leading to the need for great debugging tools. At Oxide, we've found that debuggers can be even more va...
AI Discourse with Steve Klabnik
05 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last week, our colleague (and frequent Oxide and Friends guest) Steve Klabnik made some new friends on the Internet with a blog entry on AI discourse....
AI, Materials, and Fraud with Ben Shindel
24 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Late in 2024, an economics paper captured the attention of the world. AI, it claimed, had a tremendous impact on materials research, disproportionally...
RIP USENIX ATC
15 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam discuss the recent announcement of the discontinuation of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC), reminiscing about their own vis...
Solutions Software Engineering with Matthew Sanabria
07 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Matthew Sanabria joins Bryan and Adam to talk about his role at Oxide--Solutions Software Engineer--and how it fits in with engineering, sales, suppor...
Shootout at the CNCF Corral
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last week the kerfuffle between Synadia and CNCF, tussling over the ownership and futures of NATS, bled into the public. The outcome may cast a long s...
Bringing up Cosmo
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Oxide is bringing up its next generation server. To discuss the (amazingly smooth) bringup process, Bryan and Adam were joined by members of the oxide...
Character Limit with Kate Conger and Ryan Mac
17 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam have been gushing for months over Character Limit, the fantastic book by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac about Elon Musk's haphazard and disas...
Hell is other networks
04 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An Oxide customer encountered a peculiar issue at the intersection of their Oxide network and their broader network. Bryan and Adam were joined by sev...
Raiding the Minibar
01 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Much of the work at Oxide goes into hardware and software used to build and test the eventual product. Bryan and Adam were joined by Ian, Doug, and Na...
Lip-Bu Tan's Intel
21 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Intel has a new CEO! And it's Lip-Bu Tan. We had assumed it would not be Lip-Bu--he was such a clear front-runner that the more time passed the less l...
A Happy Day For Rust
15 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Recently, a change to a utility in the Rust toolchain changed behavior in a way that impacted users. Rather than being a story of frustration and aspe...
A Crate is Born
06 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam were joined by Oxide colleagues Andrew, Rain, and John to talk about creating a general purpose crate for diffing structures. More gene...
Transparency in Hardware/Software Interfaces
28 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The value of transparency in engineering can have huge benefits--nothing can compare to the momentum of an enthusiastic community! Bryan and Adam disc...
A Half-Century of Silicon Valley with Randy Shoup
24 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Randy Shoup joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to look at the history of Silicon Valley through the lens of Randy's 50 years--as the child of g...
Textual UIs with Orhun Parmaksız
13 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ratatui is a Rust framework for building rich--and incredible--UIs in the terminal. Bryan and Adam were joined by Orhun Parmaksız, who leads the proj...
AI Disruption: DeepSeek and Cerebras
06 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
DeepSeek was a disruptive surprise at the start of 2025--an open weights model trained at a fraction of the cost of previous models. Bryan and Adam we...
Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleague, Robert Mustacchi.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that ...
Crates We Love
16 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Love Rust? Us too. One of its great strengths is its ecosystem of crates. Rain, Eliza, and Steve from the Oxide team join Bryan and Adam to talk about...
Predictions 2025
10 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The annual predictions tradition returns for 2025! Bryan and Adam were joined by Simon Willison, Mike Cafarella, Steve Tuck, and Steve Klabnik to revi...
OxF 2024 Wrap-Up
30 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam look back on the year of Oxide and Friends episodes, reflecting on favorite shows, moments, and (at length) cover images.Your hosts wer...
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Frazee joins Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about the inner workings of Bluesky and the AT Protocol. Paul and the Bluesky team have b...
Conferences in Tech
14 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam were joined by Theo Schlossnagle, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, and Steve O'Grady to talk about conferences in tech. A lot has changed in the p...
Intel after Gelsinger
05 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Holy Sh**! Pat Gelsinger announced his "retirement" leaving a rudderless Intel without a captain. How did Intel get here? Some of the cultural problem...
Technical Blogging
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam were joined by authors of the forthcoming book "Writing for Developers", Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop, to talk about blogging--for Br...
Books in the Box IV
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The 4th installment of the Oxide and Friends book recommendation series. After a brief(ish) diversion into Crimson Twins, Tomax and Xamot, Bryan and A...
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
16 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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. Wha...
Querying Metrics with OxQL
02 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 metr...
RTO or GTFO
26 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 epiph...
Reflecting on Founder Mode
20 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
30 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
RFDs--Requests for Discussion--are how we at Oxide discuss... just about everything! Technical design, hardware component selection, changes in proces...
Whither CockroachDB?
21 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Lots of engineering decisions get made on vibes. Popularity, anecdotes—they can lead to expedient decisions rather than rigorous ones. At Oxide, our...
The Saga of Sagas
14 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Oxide control plane coordinates multiple services to do complex, compound operations. Early on, we knew we wanted to provide a robust structure fo...
Pragmatic LLM usage with Nicholas Carlini
09 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ad...
CrowdStrike BSOD Fiasco with Katie Moussouris
25 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 impact...
Heterogeneous Computing with Raja Koduri
18 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 aft...
Innovation Tokens with Charity Majors
11 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Charity Majors joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about the idea of "innovation tokens"--a fixed budget for, so called, "innovative" pr...
Is NVIDIA like Sun from the Dot Com Bubble?
27 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Every so often we like to give our Oxide and Friends hot takes (or as Adam puts it "Bryan getting trolled on Twitter"). This time, a viral tweet sugge...
Musing with Changelog's Adam Stacoviak
17 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam were joined by The Changelog’s Adam Stacoviak for a … wide ranging conversation! Something for everyone—especially fans of HBO’...
Rebooting a datacenter: A decade later
30 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Back in May 2014 Joyent accidentally rebooted an entire datacenter (not just the handful of nodes as intended!). That incident--traumatic was it was--...
Bookclub: How Life Works by Philip Ball
22 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The long-awaited Oxide and Friends bookclub! Bryan and Adam were joined by special guest--and real life biologist--Greg Cost to discuss Philip Ball's ...
All we have to fear is FUD itself
25 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Oxide Friends have talked about the Hashicorp license change, the emergence of an open source fork of Terraform in OpenTofu, and other topics in o...
A Baseball Startup with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel
17 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan, Adam, Steve, and the Oxide Friends are joined by the founders of the Oakland Ballers, the continuation of a long history of baseball in Oakland...
Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres Freund
10 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Andres Freund joined Bryan and Adam to talk about his discovery of the xz backdoor. It’s an incredible story… so great to get into the details wit...
Cultural Idiosyncrasies
03 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Oxide Friends talk about about cultural idiosyncrasies--turns out we have a lot of them at Oxide! Some might even sound good enough for you to try...
Adversarial Machine Learning
27 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Nicholas Carlini joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about his work with adversarial machine learning. He's found sequences of--seemingl...
Data Visualization
15 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Data visualization is an important--and overlooked!--tool in the software engineer's tool belt. Bryan describes a recent journey with gnuplot while Ox...
Crucible: The Oxide Storage Service
14 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam are joined by members of the Oxide storage team--Josh, Alan, James, and Matt--to talk about Crucible, the service that provides block s...
Innovation Stagnation?
07 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sometimes Bryan gets trolled by a tweet and brings it to Adam and the Oxide Friends. This was a well-crafted troll: is innovation slowing? Are the mos...
Helios
01 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam are joined by Oxide colleagues Josh Clulow, Patrick Mooney, and Steve Klabnik to discuss Helios, the operating system that runs on the ...
What's taking so long?!
24 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We love Rust at Oxide, but the haters aren’t wrong: builds can be slow. Bryan and Adam are joined by Sean Klein, Rain Paharia, and Steve Klabnik to ...
Open Source LLMs with Simon Willison
17 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Simon Willison joined Bryan and Adam to discuss a recent article maligning open source large language models. Simon has so much practical experience w...
Predictions 2024!
10 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam are joined by MIT Research Scientist, Michael Cafarella, for our annual predictions episode where we check in on past predictions and g...
AMD's MI300 and the Future of Accelerated Compute
11 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
George Cozma from Chips and Cheese and Jordan Ranous from Storage Review joined Adam, Bryan, and the Oxide Friends to discuss AMD’s recent MI300 ann...
Framework Computer with Nirav Patel
04 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Nirav Patel, CEO and founder of Framework Computer, join Bryan and Adam to talk about building a new computer company (yes! another new computer compa...
OpenAI's Boardroom Brawl
27 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
So… OpenAI happened… and Bryan and Adam try it break it down with help from Steve Tuck and even more special guest Chuck McManis.In addition to Br...
Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz
06 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam were joined by Gergely Orosz, the Pragmatic Engineer, to talk about Oxide's hiring process, the experiences that led to that process, a...
Launching the Cloud Computer
30 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Oxide Founder and CEO, Steve Tuck, joined Bryan, Adam, and Oxide Friend, Steve Klabnik, to talk about our recent announcements: general availability o...
Open Source and Capitalism with Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob
23 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob joined Adam and Bryan to continue their panel discussion with Bryan following up his p99conf talk revisiting open sourc...
Settling Beef
16 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Recently, a clip from Oxide and Friends was played by another podcast as something of a punching bag. Adam was called "uneducated" and Bryan, it was o...
Mr. Nagle's Wild Ride
02 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Adam and the Oxide Friends follow Bryan on Mr. Nagle's Wild Ride as he investigates performance anomalies. Bryan used all manner of tool from gnuplot ...
DTrace at 20
11 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam reminisce about the DTrace journey 20 years after first integrating the code into Solaris back in September 2003.In addition to Bryan C...
Open Source Anti-Patterns with Kelsey Hightower
28 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Kelsey Hightower joined Bryan and Adam to revisit a topic Bryan had spoken about a decade ago: corporate open source anti-patterns. Kelsey brought his...
Fork in the road for Terraform?
21 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On August 10th, HashiCorp made the controversial decision to re-license some of the popular, formerly-open source project under the Business Source Li...
No Silver Bullets
14 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Steve Klabnik discuss Fred Brooks' essay "No Silver Bullets"--ostensibly apropos of nothing!--discussing the challenges to 10x (or 100x!) im...
Books in the Box III
24 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In an Oxide and Friends tradition, Bryan and Adam invite the community to share book recommendations.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal,...
The Frontend of the Computer
17 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam were joined by Justin and David from the Oxide team to talk about their work on the Oxide Console--the frontend to the Oxide computer. ...
Tales from Manufacturing: Shipping Rack 1
10 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam were joined by members of the Oxide operations team to discuss the logistics of actually assembling the first Oxide Rack, crating it, s...
Shipping the first Oxide rack: Your questions answered!
03 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On this week's show, Adam Leventhal posed questions from Hacker News (mostly) to Oxide founders Bryan Cantrill and Steve Tuck. Stick around until the ...
Okay, Doomer: A Rebuttal to AI Doom-mongering
26 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam offer a rebuttal to the AI doomerism that has been gaining volume. And--hoo-boy--this one had some range. Heaven’s Gate, ceteris pari...
Software Verificationpalooza
19 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Greg and Rain from the Oxide team joined Bryan and Adam to talk about powerful methods of verifying software: formal methods in the form of TLA+ and p...
Virtualizing Time
12 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Jordan Hendricks joined Bryan and Adam to talk about her work virtualizing time--particularly challenging when migrating virtual machines from one phy...
Open Source Governance
30 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam are joined by Ashley Williams to talk about open source governance... and the recently, and various stumblings of the Rust project lead...
Building Together: Oxide and Samtec
15 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam are joined by Jonathan and Jignesh from Samtec to discuss working together to build the Oxide Rack. We've all seen bad vendors--what do...
The Network Behind the Network
08 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam are joined by Oxide colleagues Arjen, Matt, John, and Nathaneal to talk about the management network--the brainstem of the Oxide Rack. ...
Blue Skies Over Mastodon (with Erin Kissane and Tim Bray)
01 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Erin Kissane joins Bryan and Adam to talk the new social network "Bluesky" through the lens of her blog post "Blue Skies Over Mastodon". Long-time fri...
Rust Trademark: Argle-bargle or Foofaraw?
17 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Rust Foundation caused a fracas with their proposed new trademark rules. Bryan and Adam were lucky enough to be joined by Ashley Williams, Adam Ja...
Cabling the Backplane
03 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam are joined by Doug Wibben and Robert Keith to talk about the mechanical design of the cabled backplane of the Oxide rack that allows fo...
Get You a State Machine for Great Good
27 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Andrew Stone of Oxide Engineering joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about his purpose-built, replay debugger for the Oxide setup textu...
Does a GPT future need software engineers?
20 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam and the Oxide Friends take on GPT and its implications for software engineering. Many aspiring programmers are concerned that the futur...
On Silicon Valley Bank with Eric Vishria
17 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Eric Vishria of Benchmark and Oxide CEO, Steve Tuck, join Bryan and Adam to talk about Silicon Valley Bank, its role in the startup ecosystem, and the...
Rack-scale Networking
27 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan and Adam are joined by a number of members of the Oxide networking team to talk about the networking software that drives the Oxide rack. It tur...
Memory Safety with Yael Grauer
13 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Yael Grauer joined Bryan, Adam, Steve Klabnik, and the Oxide Friends to talk about her recent Consumer Reports article on memory safety and memory saf...
Oxide and the Chamber of Mysteries
06 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Members of the Oxide team join Bryan and Adam to talk about our journey through compliance (spoiler: we passed!). Oxide and Friends: February 6th, 20...
Revisiting Unikernels
23 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Oxide and Friends: January 23rd, 2023Revisiting UnikernelsWe've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them...
The Power of Proto Boards!
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from January 16th, 2023.In add...