I've been in tech industry for a long time and I write about stuff in that general vicinity
I’ve used a 3D printer in a hobby capacity off and on for over 10 years. I recently got a new printer and it is a huge leap above and beyond what I’ve used before in terms of simplicity, reliability and fun. This is a great time to consider getting a 3D printer. Early days (2013) I assume 3D printing sounds as magical to everyone as it did (does?) to me: a machine that fabricates objects? Unreal.…
JSON Schema isn’t a great way to describe data… but it’s both a popular and pervasive way to describe data. For the past several years I’ve been working on a Rust crate typify that compiles JSON Schema into Rust types. In a previous post, I wrote about some of the frustrating complexities of JSON Schema, the evolving specification, and my own increasing familiarity with its nuances. Since then I…
A few weeks ago, Oxide hosted dtrace.conf(24), the (mostly) quadrennial DTrace conference. We started the conference in 2008, continuing in 2012 and 2016. When I joined Oxide in 2020; it felt like stars aligning for dtrace.conf(20)… ultimately canceled due to Covid. This year, we moved the conference online. As an unconference, we’re very reliant on folks showing up ready to present. Would we even…
I gave a talk at Rustlab this past November about work my colleague, Ben Naecker, and I did to add DTrace USDT (user-land statically defined tracing) probes to our Rust code. I’ve given a lot of talks about DTrace over the years; I only realized as I got on stage how excited I was to talk about the confluence of DTrace and Rust… and to an audience that may have never seen DTrace in use. I got to…
Bryan and I just wrapped up season 4 of Oxide and Friends . Borrowing from The Changelog , we capped the season with a look back on the past year of episodes. While the Changelog folks pick their favorite titles, we had more to say about our favorite cover images. Below I’ve summarized our year in images. Click on the left for YouTube, and the right for the podcast (with links to various podcast…
I started the year thinking that we had done some neat work in the Rust / API / OpenAPI ecosystem and I wanted to talk about it. I found my people at the Nordic APIs Austin Summit; it’s a conference that had been on my radar for a while, but it was my first time attending. I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting the sessions and conversations were… and was pleased to share some stuff we’ve…
A bit over two years ago, I started work on typify , a library to generate Rust types from JSON Schema. It took me a while to figure out it was a compiler, but I’ll call it that now: it’s a compiler! It started life as a necessary component of an OpenAPI SDK generator—a pretty important building block for the control plane services at Oxide. Evolving the compiler has become somewhere between a…
In 2021 Twitter rolled out Spaces. Listen to people you follow! Talk to followers! It sounded awful–the neologism “webinar” uncomfortably close. So when Bryan asked if I’d hang out with him to give it a shot, I set aside my skepticism–at the very least it would break up the mid-pandemic monotony! And it was great! The next week illumos dropped support for SPARC so we had Tom Lyon join us (now…
DTrace’s User-land Statically-Defined Tracing (USDT) was… kind of an accident. Bryan has (kindly) retconned the genesis of USDT as a way to understand dynamic languages[citation needed]. Indeed, it’s been essential for that, but its origins were much less ambitious or prescient. Way back in the 1990s(!) Jeff Bonwick had created a program called lockstat(1M) for live instrumentation of kernel…
AWS Outposts is a rack-scale computer that runs on premises. The most recent re:Invent had a bunch of sessions about changes to Outposts. One change that happened without much fanfare is a new lower price (note: LOW-ER, not LOW). I looked at Outposts pricing last year shortly after it was released. As with that analysis there are some more stories and oddities hiding in the numbers: customer and…