Recent content on Ramblings from Jessie
DUM-E (“dummy”) and U (“you”) are the names of the robot arms in the Iron Man movies. After watching this movie for the n-teenth time, I have a strong urge to also have robotic arms in a workshop like Tony Stark. You can see the value of the robots clearly throughout the movie. The robots allow Tony to produce suits more quickly, help test the suits, and provide periodic comedic relief. At one…
Tesla had its first Battery Day on September 22nd, 2020 1 . What a fantastic world we live in that we can witness the first Apple-like keynote for batteries. Batteries are a part of our everyday life; without them, the world would be a much different place. Your cellphone, flashlight, tablet, laptops, drones, cars, and other devices would not be portable and operational without batteries. At the…
I previously wrote a bit about our internal infrastructure in my post on The Art of Automation . This post is going to go into details about our automated Chief infrastructure Officer (CIO). I joke so much that I automated our CIO that I even named the repo holding the code… cio . I took the time this weekend to finally clean up some of this code. Previously, our infrastructure was held…
I have wanted a 3D printer for a very long time. I hope you can tell from my ACM Queue column that I like to do a lot of research and I tend to want the best thing. I had been keeping my eyes on the 3D printer product space for quite some time. This article is going to go over the technical details behind 3D printing as well as my experience with two different products. When I finally decided to…
My mom has a tendency to buy these really terribly spec’d Windows machines. She’s been doing it for as long as I’ve been alive. I was surprised when on one of our latest Zoom calls she said “You know what, I’m beginning to think that size matters.” I’ve only been telling her this for years! Here’s the problem. There are a bunch of shitty Windows…
Being cooped up at home got me looking into the new Xbox and PlayStation 5. I was curious about the innovations in the consoles since their successors. Both claim to have ray tracing and support for 8K graphics. This then got me thinking about how prevalent 8K televisions are today. 8K televisions seem to be in the same state as 4K televisions a few years ago. One thing I know through my life is…
I am unsure if my love of automation comes from a dislike of doing the same thing twice or an overall desire to be more productive and make everything more efficient. Like a lot of programmers, I often ask myself “can this be scripted” when I find myself doing a manual task. I was inspired recently by reading Wolfram’s writing on his personal infrastructure for productivity 1 . I, too, have…
A byte of data has been stored in a number of different ways as newer, better, and faster mediums of storage are introduced. A byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly refers to eight bits. A bit is a unit of information that can be expressed as 0 or 1, representing logical state. In the case of paper cards, a bit was stored as the presence or absence of a hole in the card at a…
When you upload photos to Instagram, back up your phone to “the cloud”, send an email through GMail, or save a document in a storage application like Dropbox or Google Drive, your data is being saved in a data center. These data centers are airplane hangar-sized warehouses, packed to the brim with racks of servers and cooling mechanisms. Depending on the application you are using you are likely…
I had a lot of fun writing blog posts in the past about my home lab and some of my personal infrastructure so I thought I would do the same as we built out our office. Much like moving into a new place, the first thing I always plan to have setup on move-in day is internet. We did the same with our office as well. Before we even had any real furniture, we made sure that we had a network…
WE STARTED A COMPUTER COMPANY!! You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to say that! I guess some context would help… Steve Tuck , Bryan Cantrill , and I officially started the Oxide Computer Company . Since then, we’ve been working on closing up fundraising, getting an awesome office, and hiring! You are probably thinking “a computer company? that’s…
Last week I attended the Open Source Firmware Conference . It was amazing! The talks, people, and overall feel of the conference really left me feeling inspired and lucky to attend. Having been pushed to attend vendor conferences and trade shows through my career for various jobs, it was so refreshing to have the chance to hang out with folks from such a genuine community that really just want to…
At lunch today I learned about Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) which is an implementation of transactional memory. The conversation started as a rant about why transactional memory is bad but then it evolved into how this concept even came to be and how it even got implemented if it’s such a terrible idea. What is transactional memory? First let’s start by going over…
Hello! I thought it would be fun to write a post aimed towards business leaders making technology decisions for their organizations. There is a lot of hype in our field and little truth behind the hype. Like most things I write about, this started from an idea I had on Twitter: has anyone ever done technical breakdowns of these products in Gartner reports that are actually just trash, is this…
Below is the foreward for the new book on Linux Observability with BPF by two of my favorite programmers, David Calavera and Lorenzo Fontana ! I was pretty stoked about getting to write the foreward, I asked O’Reilly if I could publish it on my blog as well and they said yes. I hope you all check out this book and share what you’ve built after! As a programmer (and a self confessed…
“Can I get an encore, do you want more” - Jay-Z I recently read Ben Horowitz’s book, The Hard Thing about Hard Things . It’s really eye opening and creates a level of empathy in the reader for leaders that make hard decisions every day. It covers everything from how to know your company is toxic to how to do layoffs. Ben starts each chapter with a rap quote so as did I above ;)…
I gave a talk recently at GoTo Chicago on Why open source firmware is important and I thought it would be nice to also write a blog post with my findings. This post will focus on why open source firmware is important for security. Privilege Levels In your typical “stack” today you have the various levels of privileges. Ring 3 - Userspace: has the least amount of privileges, short of there being a…
Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting with the Transposit team in San Francisco. Tech is a super small world and it turns out the two founders and I are separated by one-degree through several different people we know. In meeting them I closed many loops without even realizing it, but I digress… Their product is really cool, it exposes a SQL interface for interacting with numerous APIs…
I came up with a list of questions I would ask my cloud provider if I was buying a product. They are as follows: 1. What problem is this solving? I would ask this to make sure I even need this product. So many people tend to buy into the hype for “shiny”, they miss if they even needed the thing in the first place. 2. How did you implement this? What is your threat model? So much of the…
This post is co-authored by Kathy Simpson . “understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.” ― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking As leaders, setting up a structure that helps us navigate decisions under pressure is of the utmost importance. When writing…
Last week I got to see what it was like to be an investigative journalist for a day. It was thrilling. I will get into what I learned but first I waned to give some background on why I was doing this. I have a general curiosity for people. It’s interesting to me to uncover what people are motivated by. Humans are individual snowflakes and no one is exactly like the next. It is our unique…
I’ve been talking to a lot of people in different layers of the stack during my funemployment. I wanted to share one of the problems I’ve been thinking about and maybe you can think of some clever solutions to solve it. Conway’s Law states “organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these…
I recently have started researching and playing around with RISC-V for fun. I thought it might be nice to combine some of what I’ve learned into a blog post. However, I don’t just want to highlight what I learned. I want to use this as an example of how to go about learning something new. Recently, Erik St. Martin , Shubheksha Jalan , and I were discussing how we learn new things and we all…
I learned a lot about myself and the way big companies are organized over the past year or so. I had mentioned a bit in a previous blog post and podcast about “the N + 1 shithead problem” (from Bryan Cantrill’s talk on leadership ). To reiterate, the “N +1 shithead problem” occurs when you are demotivated by seeing people who are a level above you behave poorly, or more bluntly when they behave…
I have written a bit about how I am spending my time while being unemployed and I thought I would continue. There was one thing I had left out of my previous post on my visit to the Pentagon . THEY HAVE A REAL ENIGMA MACHINE THERE. Okay, moving on… QCon and University of Cambridge I gave a talk at QCon on SGX and ended up giving the same talk to some really awesome folks at University of…
I stated in my first post on my reflections of leadership in other industries that I would write a follow up post after having hung out in the world of finance for a day. This is pretty easy to do when you live in NYC. Originally for college, I was a finance major at NYU Stern School of Business before transferring out, so I have always had a bit of affinity for it. I consider myself pretty good…
I’ve had a bit of a crazy week. Tuesday, I got a tour of the Pentagon from a friend that is in the US Digital Service (USDS) for the Department of Defense (DoD), called the Defense Digital Service (DDS). Wednesday (the day of writing this), I shadowed a friend who is a surgical resident during their shift in a hospital. Friday, I have plans to shadow a friend who is an investment banker at a…
You can find my goodreads account at goodreads.com/jessfraz . Romanticized Tech I call this genre of books “romanticized tech” because of the way tech is portrayed in them in a very idealistic and whimsical way. It’s nice to pick up one of these if you are feeling very “Black Mirror” to remember why you might have even started in this field. Soul of a New Machine :…
A few of you, thank you, have reached out to me saying that you love my writing style. It means a lot to me because I like to think that I write how I speak. This was not always taken well, however. I tend to be a bit of a sarcastic troll. The following post is meant to show others who may be like me and hesitant towards their writing style due to feedback they’ve gotten. I’d love to empower them…
I like to consider all the variables in a problem space before coming to a conclusion. As humans we have a tendency to jump to conclusions rather quickly. I try not to do this but everyone makes mistakes. More information about Intel SGX was brought to my attention after my initial blog post on it. I’d like to take the time to go through that information and my current thoughts on the technology…
I’m a huge, HUGE, fan of LD_PRELOAD let me tell you… oh wait it’s my blog so I’m going to. Where do I begin… About three years ago, I wrote a blog post about the 10 LDFLAGS I love . After writing the post, I realized I should have made the number odd because I think that is part of BuzzFeed’s “click algorithm.” But more seriously, I realized just how many people on the internet you can upset when…
From the Intel x86 Manual : In the mid-1960s, Intel cofounder and Chairman Emeritus Gordon Moore had this observation: “… the number of transistors that would be incorporated on a silicon die would double every 18 months for the next several years.” Over the past three and half decades, this prediction known as “Moore’s Law” has continued to hold true. Moore’s Law is coming up a lot…
I started dipping into some firmware and hardware things on my vacation and unemployment and I figured I would take you down my journey as well. Baseboard management controller The first thing I dipped into was openbmc . This is pretty cool. At face value it has support for a lot of different boards. It uses IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) to perform tasks for monitoring and…
I thought it would be fun to start a blog post series containing design docs from my personal archive that never saw the light of day. This will be the first of the series. It contains what I thought about in detail for a general multi-tenant secured container orchestrator. The use case would be for running third party code securely isolated from each other. If you would like to see this in google…
My top used shell command is | . This is called a pipe. In brief, the | allows for the output of one program (on the left) to become the input of another program (on the right). It is a way of connecting two commands together. For example, if I were to run the following: echo "hello" I get the output hello . But if I run: echo "hello" | figlet The figlet program, changes the letters in hello to…
I thought it might be fun to write a blog post on “The Life of a GitHub Action.” When you go through orientation at Google they walk you through “The Life of a Query” and it was one of my favorite things. So I am re-applying the same for a GitHub Action. For those unfamiliar Actions was a feature launched at GitHub’s conference Universe last year. You can sign up for…
I have realized recently that a lot of people think I am just a shill for Kubernetes and I am not. What I have done is write a few blog posts on some interesting problems to be solved in Kubernetes. But I would like to emphasize that those problems are pretty exclusive to the way Kubernetes was designed and you could easily build your own orchestrator without them. Use Containerd If you need an…
Wireguard is the hip, new way to VPN :P No, but seriously I wanted to try it out because it is super interesting and I think the direction it is going is awesome. Read about it on their website if you have not already. What is cool about Wireguard is it integrates into the Linux networking stack so you have a lot of power over interactions with it. In other words, it is very easy to clone the…
I figured it would be nice to have one canonical place for talks I have given. So here it is… 2019 CERN - Why Open Source Firmware is Important This talk will dive into some of the problems of running servers at scale, including data from surveys about physical infrastructure and firmware concerns. In this talk, we’ll understand how open source firmware will solve some of these common…
There seems to be some confusion around sandboxing containers as of late, mostly because of the recent launch of gvisor . Before I get into the body of this post I would like to make one thing clear. I have no problem with gvisor itself. I think it is very technically “cool.” I do have a problem with the messaging around it and marketing. There is a large amount of ignorance towards…
EDIT: See my post on a design doc for a multi-tenant orchestrator instead. I wrote this when an internal requirement was to use Kubernetes but I do not personally think you should use Kubernetes for this use case. Kubernetes is the new kernel. We can refer to it as a “cluster kernel” versus the typical operating system kernel. This means a lot of great things for users trying to deploy…
A lot of people seem to want to be able to build container images in Kubernetes without mounting in the docker socket or doing anything to compromise the security of their cluster. This all was brought to my attention when my awesome coworker at Gabe Monroy and I were chatting with Michelle Noorali over pizza at Kubecon in Austin last December. Here is pretty much how it went down: Gabe: I’d would…
This is a story about how I got nerd sniped by a blog post from Cloudflare Engineering . The TLDR on their post is that you can script in Go if you use BINFMT_MISC in the kernel. BINFMT_MISC is really well documented and awesome. In the end, all they had to do to script in Go was to mount the filesystem: $ mount binfmt_misc -t binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc Then, register the Go script…
This post is kind of like “part two” on my series on all the weird things I do for my personal infrastructure. If you missed “part one”, you should check out Home Lab is the Dopest Lab . I run a lot of little things to make my life easier, like a CI, some bots, and a bunch of services just for the lolz. This post will go over all of those. These run scattered across my NUCs…
I always have some random side project I am working on, whether it is making the world’s most over engineered desktop OS all running in containers or updating all my Makefiles to be the definition of glittering beauty. This post is going to go over I how I recently redid all my home networking and ultimately how I got to here: ssh-ed into my dev NUC from a Pixelbook 39,000 feet,…
I recently started a job at Microsoft. In my first week I have already learned so much about Windows, I figured I would try to put it all into writing. This post is coming to you from a Windows Subsystem for Linux console! I'm headed to Seattle because I'M JOINING MICROSOFT, at the airport wearing this awesome shirt from @listonb & @Taylorb_msft ���� pic.twitter.com/8rnAg1dsPd — jessie…
I recently gave a talk at DevOps Days ( slides ) and it had a pretty great response. I’m still pretty care-mad about the topics it covered so I figured I would turn some key points from it into a blog post. The overall outline of the talk covered the past, present, and future of usable security. Let’s start with the past. The Past A lot of the security tooling of the past (that we…
If you are new to my blog then you might be new to the concept of Linux kernel namespaces. I suggest first reading Getting Towards Real Sandbox Containers and Setting the Record Straight: containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs . Linux namespaces are one of the primitives that make up what is known as a “container.” They control what a process can see. Cgroups, the other main ingredient…
I’m tired of having the same conversation over and over again with people so I figured I would put it into a blog post. Many people ask me if I have tried or what I think of Solaris Zones / BSD Jails. The answer is simply: I have tried them and I definitely like them. The conversation then heads towards them telling me how Zones and Jails are far superior to containers and that I should…
Over the past couple of years I have set out to create the ultimate Linux on the desktop experience for myself. Obviously everyone who runs Linux has their own opinions on things . What this post will outline is my ultimate Linux on the desktop experience. So just remember that before you get your panties in a knot on HackerNews because you live and die by Xmonad (I live and die by i3, fight me).…