Recent content on The Observation Deck
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 means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids. Now, surely many generations have looked back at the three decades since their undergraduate years with a mix of nostalgia for the past and apprehension for the future, so it’s…
In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as 'the Camel Book' — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris: If we’re going to talk about good software design, we have to talk about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, the basis of good software design. We’ve all fallen into the trap of using…
Recently, the New Stack had a piece excerpting some of my conversation with Gergely Orosz . In introducing me in the piece, Joab Jackson writes 'Cantrill has had a knack at being at the right place at the right time.' While this is objectively true at some level, it also gave me a double take: it rarely felt true at the time. When I entered university in 1992, it didn’t feel like the right time:…
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, but first among them: I could not stomach the disdain that Oracle had for its own customers. Sun — for all of its (many!) other faults — loved its customers. I bring this up because I was recently contacted by a former Sun colleague, who had some…
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 important social network to me. This isn’t necessarily due to LinkedIn’s sparkling competence, of course. To the contrary, LinkedIn is the Gerald Ford of social networks: the normal one that was left standing as the Richard Nixons and the Spiro Agnews of…
On a Sunday night not too long ago, something extraordinary happened in West Oakland: the Oakland Ballers — an independent baseball team not even two years old — won the Pioneer League championship, bringing a baseball championship to Oakland for the first time since 1989. The atmosphere was electric, but to an outsider, the roar of the packed house might have seemed perplexing: why such fervor…
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 design, systems software provides an abstraction for programs, insulating programmers from the filthy details that lie beneath; piercing that abstraction to implement the underlying system is to embrace those details and their gnarly implications.…
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 B, led by a new strategic partner in USIT with participation from all existing Oxide investors. To put that number in perspective: over the nearly six year lifetime of the company, we have raised $89M; our $100M Series B more than doubles our total…
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 that it would be temporarily crashing on Sacramento’s couch, I pointed out that the incompetence of this ownership knows no depth or bounds : they they will always find new ways to screw up. Now we are near the mid-point of that first season in…
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 have seen otherwise. I was not a college athlete (and knew little of even baseball until he got the bug at age seven), so I have learned much along the way. You — perhaps like me several years ago — may have an idea of how college athletics proceeds:…
USENIX made the decision this week to discontinue its flagship Annual Technical Conference . When USENIX was started in 1975 — before the Internet, really — conferences were the fastest vector for practitioners to formally share their ideas, and USENIX ATC flourished. Speaking for myself, I came up lionizing ATC: I was an undergraduate in the early 1990s, and programs like the USENIX Summer 1994…
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 on our audacious vision . While we had had success hiring in our personal networks, those networks now felt tapped; we needed to get further afield. As is our wont, we got together as a team and brainstormed: how could we get a bigger and broader…
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 manager. In January 2021, when Gelsinger was abruptly named the CEO of Intel, this is more or less all I knew of him — and I found myself urgently needing to learn much more. To understand my urgency, it’s worth rewinding the clock back to late 2019…
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 way, is not a DTrace user group, but more of a face-to-face meeting with people actively involved in DTrace — either by porting it to another system, by integrating probes into higher level environments, by building higher-level tools on top of DTrace…
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 history of writing in general and blogging in particular. In 2004, blogging wasn’t exactly new (it had been around in one form or another for as long as a decade), but it also wasn’t something that I was actively engaged in.…
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 early investor in Oxide, passed away in September after a battle with cancer . We lost Charles far too soon; he had a tremendous influence on the careers of us both. Our relationship with Charles dates back nearly two decades, to his involvement with…
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 as Graham grimly predicts: “as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it”). When building a company, founders are engaged in several different acts at once: raising capital;…
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 it root caused and fixed. But on the other, this particular issue was something of an Oxide object lesson, representative not just of the technologies but also of the culture we have built here. I wasn’t the only person who thought so, and two of my…
Years ago, Jeff Bezos famously quipped that 'your margin is my opportunity.' This was of course aimed not at Amazon’s customers, but rather its competitors, and it was deadly serious: customers of AWS in those bygone years will fondly remember that every re:Invent brought with it another round of price cuts. This era did not merely reflect Bezos’s relentless execution, but also a disposition…
I (finally) read Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust , and I can’t recommend it strongly enough. This book had been on my queue for years, and I put it off for the same reason that you have probably put it off: we don’t like to confront difficult things. But the book is superlative: not only is it fascinating and well-researched but given the current level of anxiety about the…