The contagion of fear đź”—
I have a difficult confession to make — a shameful incident that I have never spoken of, even to those closest to me. Late one night in my first year [...]
The Observation Deck
Posts
The revolt of the reader đź”—
Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound infl [...]
A portentous reunion đź”—
I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI [...]
The peril of laziness lost đź”—
In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as "the Camel Book" — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three v [...]
The right place at the right time đź”—
Recently, the New Stack had a piece excerpting some of my conversation with Gergely Orosz. In introducing me in the piece, Joab Jackson writes "Cantri [...]
Love your customers đź”—
Note: This was originally published as a LinkedIn post on December 20, 2025. There were many reasons why I left Oracle shortly after it acquired Sun, [...]
Your intellectual fly is open đź”—
Note: This was originally published as a LinkedIn post on November 11, 2025. I need to make a painful confession: somehow, LinkedIn has become an impo [...]
A parade in Oakland đź”—
On a Sunday night not too long ago, something extraordinary happened in West Oakland: the Oakland Ballers — an independent baseball team not even two [...]
Systems Software in the Large đź”—
Software is hard (yes, even in an era of vibe coding), and systems software — the silent engine room of modern infrastructure — is especially so. By [...]
Our $100M Series B đź”—
Note: Thie was co-authored with Steve Tuck, and originally appeared on the Oxide blog. We don’t want to bury the lede: we have raised a $100M Series [...]
The end game for John Fisher đź”—
A year and a half ago, I wrote about the unconscionable John Fisher, the inept, soulless owner of the formerly-Oakland A’s. When the team announced th [...]
College Baseball, Venture Capital, and the Long Maybe đź”—
My son is a college baseball player. One of the singular aspects of having kids is that they open your eyes to facets of humanity that you might not h [...]
RIP USENIX ATC đź”—
USENIX made the decision this week to discontinue its flagship Annual Technical Conference. When USENIX was started in 1975 — before the Internet, re [...]
Oxide’s compensation model: How is it going? 🔗
How it started Four years ago, we were struggling to hire. Our team was small (~23 employees), and we knew that we needed many more people to execute [...]
Why Gelsinger was wrong for Intel đź”—
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 [...]
dtrace.conf(24) đź”—
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 w [...]
Blogging through the decades đź”—
Over the summer, I hit an anniversary of sorts: I’ve been blogging for two decades (!). For reasons I’ll get to, I’ve been reflecting back on my hist [...]
Remembering Charles Beeler đź”—
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 e [...]
Reflections on Founder Mode đź”—
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 [...]
Engineering a culture đź”—
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 [...]