
Today is my first day at Oxide Computer Company - steveklabnik
https://steveklabnik.com/writing/today-is-my-first-day-at-oxide-computer-company
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hs86
As a mere mortal, I am more interested in their podcast than their products.
:) Hopefully, they will produce more episodes in the future:
[https://oxide.computer/podcast/](https://oxide.computer/podcast/)

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tharne
Can someone provide on ELI5 for what this company does and how it's different?
I get that its goal is to allow folks to buy instead of rent their hardware,
but how is it different from the old days of buying servers? Are they trying
to offer folks AWS or Azure quality servers for purchase? Or am I just totally
missing this?

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steveklabnik
So, I was trying to keep this post short and to the point, but if you want a
longer description, straight from the mouth of one of the founders, you may
like
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc)

> Are they trying to offer folks AWS or Azure quality servers for purchase?

I think "quality" doesn't really capture 100% of it, but in a sense, yes. The
goal is extremely quality, performant, robust servers.

I will have to delegate the details to the above talk; I have a bunch of work
to get started on, and would just end up re-typing out what it says above, ha!

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twic
It seems that video has been posted to HN twice, but didn't attract any
comments either time, sadly.

I don't have the energy to watch a 90 minute talk, but some skipping around
finds a bit more detail about what is in the plan:

[https://youtu.be/vvZA9n3e5pc?t=1299](https://youtu.be/vvZA9n3e5pc?t=1299)

The theme seems to be giving the operator of the computer a lot more control -
eliminating opaque binary blobs, exposing the hardware more directly, etc. I
can't tell if this is a particular bee in the founders' bonnets, or a real
market demand, or if they know about some scary threat they can't talk about.

Whilst this is definitely cool, and something that will get a lot of people on
HN super pumped, it doesn't sound like something any company i have worked at
would really care about. Unless these machines also deliver significantly
better performance. But then, those companies were not hyperscalers.

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steveklabnik
My personal take on this bit is that it's not something that customers care
about directly, but impedes overall quality, which they _do_ care about. We'll
just see how it all goes, of course!

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lawrencevillain
I'm really curious as to what Oxide's plans are who are they selling servers
to – individuals or companies? Is the plan to build your own data center or is
it to throw a few of their servers in a collocated spot? Who is the
competition, cloud providers, VMWare, something else?

Anyways, good luck at your new job it sounds really exciting!

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cbilson
Even though I am an employee of a so-called “hyper-scale” cloud vendor, I
really am rooting for Oxide. There are actually a lot of hard problems in this
space, and Oxide are inherently more agile than a big cloud vendor. As long as
they focus on problems that aren’t enormous monetary black holes (which I’m
assuming would end Oxide), they are making the world a better place. Also very
much appreciate the podcast.

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x32n23nr
@steveklabnik: Just out of curiosity, did it not work out at Cloudflare? Seems
like a rather short stint.

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steveklabnik
Still on very good terms with Cloudflare. It was just over a year. I am just
extremely excited about what Oxide is up to, and wanted to get in on the
ground floor. I wasn't actually planning on leaving Cloudflare, just
sometimes, opportunities come up and you have to take them. Or at least, in
this instance, I decided I wanted to take it.

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kohtatsu
Wow, congrats!

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tomcam
404

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tosh
resolves for me by now

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steveklabnik
I recently re-did my website, and it is a bit fragile in places. Should be all
good now!

(I can't wait until Notion releases an official API...)

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thelastinuit
Yeah, the waiting is killing me.

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soweifla
I'm not interested in the incessant self promotion of a single individual.

What software products have you written from scratch?

Or are you mostly talking and keeping your name in the press.

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jamestimmins
Why is "from scratch" the determinant of a good engineer? That's a tiny
portion of the work, and only a single component of an individual's
contribution.

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shadowphex
Obviously if you are not writing your programs in binary by manually
magnetizing a hard drive, you are not a _real_ engineer.

I personally only use CPUs that I have hand made from the organic metals mined
in my backyard.

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thelastinuit
I cant stop laughing!!! I may die soon! Awesome reply!

