I am forever trying to explain, to people I know who aren’t in tech, why I am such a big fan of the Oxide Computer Company. I keep talking about Oxide because the way they work, and the way they present their work, really resonates with me. This post is meant to summarise those ways.

What Oxide does:

• Oxide sells computers for use in data centres. These are large, powerful, expensive machines used by organisations that have a serious need to process data, and do it on infrastructure they control.
• They design and produce a huge vertical slice of the whole computer stack in-house. If you’re familiar with traditional desktop computers, you might say they design the motherboard and case, among other bits. They don’t make CPUs or memory chips, but they design all the parts that connect the CPU to storage, memory, power, networking etc.
• Their philosophy is to provide value through this vertical integration: to get more efficiency from parts and systems designed to work together, to better support their customers because most problems can be solved in-house rather than waiting on vendors, to offer an Apple-like experience to everyone from the data centre operator all the way up to the software developers.

Working in public:

• Oxide produces a lot of material that they share publicly, to such a great extent that it’s actually possible and valuable to learn a lot from following them.
• They podcast regularly with the core team and other employees, friends and acquaintances, and tech industry figures. This ranges from deep dives into their own tech, bugs they’ve fixed, to tech current affairs, to just having fun and talking about baseball.
• They make some of their internal documents public, especially when they’re of interest to the broader tech world, or when they want to talk about something on a podcast and provide some internal material as supplemental reading.
• They open-source a large amount of the software that runs their stack, and consequently end up having issue tracker and pull request discussions in public also.

Commitment to open-source:

• Oxide publishes a lot of their work under permissive licenses. This ranges from helper libraries and experimental side-projects to the core services that run their entire stack, to contributing to their dependencies like IllumOS. They can do this because they’re not selling you just the software, they’re selling you an extremely valuable and powerful box full of CPUs that is animated by the software.
• Open source is a classic way to “work in public”, and being able to see issue and pull request discussions from the team is interesting in its own right, and supports other things they publish. Being able to link to issues from a podcast or blog post makes the entire body of work richer.
• Their commitment to making the software available to their customers is another way they live out their values. They’re saying that, as an Oxide customer, you get to know exactly what’s running in your own data centre.

A writing and reading culture:

• Oxide talk proudly about writing a lot. They also publish a small but significant portion of what they write. Their public RFDs are really interesting to read, whether they’re generally applicable, or deeply specific to their own work.
• They have a very literate attitude, one that seems to come all the way from the top down. They read a lot, and discuss books they’re read, and recommend books. They seem to have an interest in history - their own history and what they can learn from it, the history of software and tech, of places.
• Their hiring process reflects this, by asking for long-form written answers as well as real work samples. This is an occasion where you can observe them living their culture out into all their practises in a way that’s unusual and refreshing.

A serious approach to work:

• Oxide’s work is serious business, at a fairly low level in the computing stack. There’s some amount of prestige associated with that, some amount of envy from me, a mere web developer. It means they have the obligation to get things right, to not accept “good enough”, to root-cause their issues instead of work around them. That rigor isn’t economically viable for all businesses, but it’s critical for Oxide. This makes their transparency all the more interesting; it feels like outsiders rarely get a glimpse into this world.
• They want to take responsibility and ownership. They often refer to being able to provide “Oxide value” by owning as much of their software and hardware as possible: instead of passing the buck to a vendor when there’s an issue, they can actually say the buck stops with them. Their product strategy is built around this.
• They put their values first, and try to tie other practises to those values. They say that writing down commitments publicly is an important part of accountability, which I heartily agree with. It’s easy to be cynical about this, and to criticise when they maybe don’t meet these values (commonly seen regarding their hiring). But I still find it so worthwhile that they can be seen trying.

For most of my career I’ve been fairly independent, working in a loosely-structured research organisation or at my own startup. I haven’t usually taken the few mentorship opportunities that were available to me. Being able to listen to, read and appreciate all Oxide’s output feels like a window into a culture driven by opinionated veterans. A little bit of what I’ve missed out on, taking the path that I have.

Much of what Oxide does wouldn’t make sense for a less well-resourced company. Or in another industry, or for a team with different personalities. But it’s inspiring to see that someone is out there doing it.

Filed under: navel gazingtech

I have recently been trying to implement, in my life, Fernando’s email inbox algorithm:

For each conversation in the inbox:

• If it’s spam, delete it.
• If it doesn’t need a reply, archive it.
• If I can reply immediately, reply and archive the conversation.
• If I can’t reply immediately, make a task to reply.*

https://borretti.me/article/inboxes-are-underrated

*I use Fastmail’s “snooze” instead of making a task somewhere else.

Fernando wonders why so few apps have inboxes that work with this algorithm:

This is the utility of inbox zero: it has no false negatives! If the inbox is empty, I know that all of my correspondence has been handled. If the inbox is non-empty, I know there is work to do.

I have been finding that an RSS reader is a great way to treat the web like an inbox.

Prompted by the Australian government tinkering with zany news media regulations a few years ago, I wrote about how RSS is a great way to consume the news (or, it would be, if news organisations wanted it to be):

https://crabmusket.net/australian-media-has-an-rss-problem/

Instead of being at the mercy of “the algorithm” implemented by various social media sites, I get to act out the “inbox algorithm”:

• Pick the site I’m in the mood for
• Skim the headlines
• If an article is short and I want to read it immediately, read it
• If I can’t read it immediately, send it to Raindrop to read later
• Mark all articles in the site as read

Newsblur, which I have been using for many years, makes this more or less the default experience. Though, I understand some RSS apps are more focused on a “feed”-like experience. Hearing this is what made me realise that Newsblur was letting me treat the web like an inbox, not like a feed.

One commenter on Hacker News describes the reason for feeds as:

the whole problem with chronological feeds, including RSS - chronological feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get attention. That’s one of the main reasons fb and other sites implemented algorithmic feeds in the first place

That is a problem with chronological feeds that mix content from all sources into a single view. But any good RSS app will break down posts by source.

When confronted with a high-volume source with hundreds of unread posts, I used to skim a few posts at a time then just mark the whole site as read. No point lying to myself about my ability to get through it all.

Other people use rating and intelligence systems to curate their own RSS feeds. Newsblur has this kind of functionality built in, but I haven’t tried to use it. These days, I just don’t tend to subscribe to high-volume sites via RSS (aggregators, whether user-contributed or traditional news organisations).

Here are some great recent RSS advocacy pieces:

• https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/
• https://andy-bell.co.uk/love-newsletters-youre-gonna-love-rss
• https://www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-rss/

Colleagues and friends who have heard of RSS often seem to think it’s “dead”, but I find most sites I’m interested in still have a feed.

Filed under: navel gazingattention economy

The rise of large language models which can convincingly reproduce human writing has made me notice something. I now catch myself “writing like an LLM” more often.

It’s a habit I’ve picked up over the years, and which I am now consciously trying to discard. I don’t write fiction (these days), so my writing is either technical documentation at work, or writing for this blog where I’m mainly trying to explain and communicate my thoughts. In both contexts, I value precision, concision, and clarity.

This great Wikipedia article describes some of the hallmarks of current LLM outputs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

For example,

• “AI writing often puffs up the importance of the subject matter”
• “AIs often introduce their own interpretation, analysis, and opinions in their writing, even when they are asked to write neutrally”
• “AI chatbots tend to attribute opinions or claims to some vague authority—a practice called weasel wording—while citing only one or two sources which may or may not actually express such view”

I expect that LLMs have these tendencies through some combination of

• not being capable of the understanding required to communicate precisely,
• not being trained to communicate precisely,
• or just not caring to.

The thing is, it’s really easy to produce these same problems as a human when you aren’t paying careful attention to what you are writing.

Sometimes, I can enter a state of “flow” where I am channeling a style of writing more than I am actually communicating specific information. I liken this to Daniel Kahneman’s “system 1” thinking: the fast, intuitive, instinctive way we can act without seeming to think at all. When I notice myself doing this, I now inadvertently think of myself as having been “writing like an LLM”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking%2C_Fast_and_Slow

Really good writing, I think, has more in common with Kahneman’s “system 2”: the slower, painstaking, attentive approach. At least, good editing should be more like that, and editing is an important part of good writing.

I don’t want to deny the productivity of the flow state. But it’s important to then go back and notice the things that need revision.

Filed under: navel gazing

This is me upholding the web developer meme of rebuilding my personal site, and writing about rebuilding my personal site!

My main motivation was to add a micro blog with tags, so I’d be incentivised to write short posts instead of long ones. But along the way I did achieve some secondary goals too:

• Try out Eleventy, which I had heard good things about. I had previously used Jekyll and Hugo.
• Simplify to a brutalist high-performance, low-maintenance design.
• Set up email subscriptions using Buttondown.

Designing the URLs:

I spent way too long thinking about URLs. Previously, it was just:

I wanted to separate my “long reads” which are less time-oriented, from my new microblog which is more timely. So I ended up with:

I like this because:

• Knocking the slug off a blog post still results in a valid page
• Each year page has a bounded and reasonable size, and you can read all posts without clicking in
• Long reads don’t have a year in the URL, which differentiates them from the off-the-cuff posts

I also added tag pages at /topic/:tag-slug so I can share the whole story of a single topic on one page.

Hosting:

I stayed with CloudFlare Pages because of their green hosting and very snappy deployment pipeline.

Migrating content to 11ty:

Getting my existing blog content into Eleventy was pretty straightforward. There were a few small hiccups, like configuring a different markdown processor to linkify my headings correctly.

Working with Eleventy’s content system was different to the very post-centric workflow I was used to. It seems good though! I’m interested to see if I can bend it to more shapes, like adding book reviews and a sketchbook, like Tom MacWright’s site.

To be done:

• Code block styles/highlighting
• lite-youtube-embed
• Another accessibility pass
• Using my domain as my Bluesky handle (not super relevant but cool)
• Add topics as Atom <category> tags

Thoughts so far:

Learning Nunjucks to create HTML templates was… let me just say, it’s been a long time since I used a templating engine that wasn’t Blade, and I much prefer it when they just let you embed the host language instead of coming up with their own expression language. “Filters” for everything feels very 2005.

I think I’ve abused the content system frightfully to create a collection of years to generate my blog post year pages from. That may need to be revised…

or, I could just write more blog posts and not worry about it!

Filed under: navel gazing

After trying to write long-form content for a while back in 2019-20 and realising that a) I now don’t have the time for it, and b) it’s hard to stay motivated for the length of an entire piece, I’ve decided to revamp my website and focus on building up a short-form blog.

As I get increasingly involved in local housing groups, my church, and hopefully doing more speaking in the local PHP and JS communities, I want to start writing up my thoughts and learning publicly.

My inspirations are:

• Tom MacWright’s consistency and vibe
• swyx’s learning in public (also Simon Willison’s TILs)
• Devon Zuegel’s strong opinions weakly held
• Cory Doctorow’s obsessive hyperlinking

I’m going to try copying Tom’s micro-blog format to give myself a space to not write multi-page multi-draft epics.

Filed under: navel gazing