Oxide and Friends

Bryan and Adam were joined by members of the Oxide team to describe the multi-year search for a mysterious source of hardware failures. All related to an ultra-reliable--and yet still not reliable enough--component.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by members of the Oxide team: Nathanael Huffman, Alan Hanson, Cliff Biffle, Eric Aasen, Robert "RFK" Keith, and Jordan Hendricks.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
Oxide RFD 630: BMR491 Glitch Mitigation Plan
RFK's report
PRs needed!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Oxide raised a truckload of capital a few weeks ago to fund the business for the foreseeable future. Bryan and Steve describe the raise, and Adam poses the best the best (and worst) questions scraped from Hacker News.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide CEO, Steve Tuck.
Previously on Oxide and Friends:
OxF s01e25 - Tales from the Bringup Lab
OxF s04e30 - Intel after Gelsinger
OxF s05e24 - Oxide’s $100M Series B
OxF s02e18 - Silicon Valley Bank with Eric Vishria
OxF s05e28 - Systems Software in the Large
Mentioned during the show:
Oxide Blog: Our $200M Series C
Oxide is hiring!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Evan Ratliff, journalist and podcaster, joined Bryan and Adam to talk about his extraordinary podcast, Shell Game, in which he started a company staffed exclusively by agentic AI.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Evan Ratliff.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
Shell Game
Evan on This American Life
MIT Review: Moltbook was peak AI theater
"Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!"
The Startup Chronicles - HurumoAI
PRs needed!
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Bryan and Adam were joined by Grady Booch, software engineering pioneer and living legend, to speak about the past present and future of software engineering. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme!
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest, Grady Booch.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them (some LLM assistance):
SAGE as foundational real-time distributed system
Software crisis demand outpaced ability to build reliable systems
Margaret Hamilton (SAGE → Apollo) and the term “software engineering”
UML
Rational Software founded (1982); acquired by IBM (2003)
OO overshot via inheritance; core idea (objects as cognitive units) endured
LLMs are unreliable narrators - they cannot do abductive reasoning
Architecture = decisions with high cost of change
Core skills persist: abstraction, coupling, cohesion, judgment
Fear cycles repeat; fundamentals endure

Grady's Book Recommendations
The Sciences of the Artificial — Herbert Simon
The Mythical Man-Month — Fred Brooks
Refactoring — Martin Fowler
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

What do LLMs mean for the future of software engineering? Will vibe-coded AI slop be the norm? Will software engineers simply be less in-demand? Rain and David join Bryan and Adam to discuss how rigorous use of LLMs can make for much more robust systems.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Rain Paharia, and David Crespo.
Previously, on Oxide and Friends:
OxF s03e08 – Does a GPT future need software engineers
OxF s04e04 – Helios
OxF s05e28 – Systems Software in the Large
OxF s04e20 – Pragmatic LLM Usage with Nicholas Carlini
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
The issue Bryan was fixing
iddqd: the crate Rain built
GhosttyDavid's bugs: 1 2 3

Rain's nextest bug: SIGTTOU when test spawns interactive shell
Oxide RFD 619: Managing types across Dropshot API versions
drift: the crate Adam built
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!