Voices of Oxide (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Voices of Oxide on the pod! Cliff Biffle (engineer), Dave Pacheco (engineer), and Ben Leonard (designer) are on the show today. Jerod and I were invited to Oxide’s annual internal conference called OxCon to meet the people and to hear the stories of what makes Oxide a truly special place to work right now.

Cliff Biffle is working on all Hubris and firmware. Cliff says “There’s a lot that happens before the ‘main CPU’ can even power on.” Dave Pacheco is leading the efforts on Oxide’s “Update” system. And Ben Leonard in charge of all things brand and design at Oxide.

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Featuring:

• Cliff Biffle – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Dave Pacheco – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Ben Leonard – LinkedIn, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• cliffle.com/blog
• Hubris - A small open-source operating system for deeply-embedded computer systems
• Update on Update

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Chapter

1. This week on The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: Depot (00:01:22)

https://depot.dev

3. Cliff Biffle on Hubris (00:03:40)

4. Oxide's writing culture (00:05:36)

5. Cliff's blogging (00:07:17)

6. Caring for product (00:08:28)

7. Into the firmware (00:09:58)

8. Cliff on Go (00:12:02)

9. Tried to not write Hubris (00:12:34)

10. Kernaling Hubris (00:14:15)

11. One rack. Many Hubris'. (00:15:29)

12. Oxide chips (00:16:11)

13. Users of Hubris (00:17:16)

14. Being IRL together (00:18:29)

15. Being on the inside (00:19:59)

16. The Office meets Silicon Valley (00:20:31)

17. People churn (00:22:17)

18. Uniform compensation (00:23:52)

19. We're all owners in some way (00:25:53)

20. Sponsor: CodeRabbit (00:27:33)

https://www.coderabbit.ai

21. Dave Pacheco on Update (00:28:40)

22. It's Mupdate (00:30:09)

23. What's an "Update"? (00:31:47)

24. Air gap users (00:34:31)

25. Update on Hubris (00:35:18)

26. Update without rebooting (00:37:31)

27. Failure to Update (00:40:55)

28. What if you didn't have to reboot? (00:45:35)

29. New novel testing (00:47:50)

30. Dave and Bryan is history (00:50:42)

31. Solving these problems with Rust (00:53:07)

32. Dave on OxCon (00:57:44)

33. Ben Leonard on Oxide's design (00:59:33)

34. Subtle tweaks (01:00:34)

35. Product is the design (01:01:14)

36. Designing Oxide's rack (01:03:09)

37. Designing the unseen hardware (01:06:32)

38. Oxide's values to design values (01:08:24)

39. Properly excited (01:09:54)

40. It's the little things (01:11:59)

41. Is growth exciting? (01:12:56)

42. Super awesome and beautiful (01:14:02)

43. Closing thoughts and stuff (01:14:35)