Logbot (Sep 26 2025 at 20:24): Logbot (Sep 26 2025 at 20:24):Voices of Oxide on the pod! Cliff Biffle (engineer), Dave Pacheco (engineer), and Ben Leonard (designer) are on the show today. Jerod and I were invited to Oxide's annual internal conference called OxCon to meet the people and to hear the stories of what makes Oxide a truly special place to work right now.
Cliff Biffle is working on all Hubris and firmware. Cliff says "There's a lot that happens before the 'main CPU' can even power on." Dave Pacheco is leading the efforts on Oxide's "Update" system. And Ben Leonard in charge of all things brand and design at Oxide. :link: https://changelog.fm/659
| Ch | Start | Title | Runs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | 00:00 | This week on The Changelog | 01:22 |
| 02 | 01:22 | Sponsor: Depot | 02:12 |
| 03 | 03:40 | Cliff Biffle on Hubris | 01:56 |
| 04 | 05:36 | Oxide's writing culture | 01:41 |
| 05 | 07:17 | Cliff's blogging | 01:12 |
| 06 | 08:28 | Caring for product | 01:30 |
| 07 | 09:58 | Into the firmware | 02:04 |
| 08 | 12:02 | Cliff on Go | 00:32 |
| 09 | 12:34 | Tried to not write Hubris | 01:41 |
| 10 | 14:15 | Kernaling Hubris | 01:14 |
| 11 | 15:29 | One rack. Many Hubris'. | 00:42 |
| 12 | 16:11 | Oxide chips | 01:06 |
| 13 | 17:16 | Users of Hubris | 01:13 |
| 14 | 18:29 | Being IRL together | 01:29 |
| 15 | 19:59 | Being on the inside | 00:32 |
| 16 | 20:31 | The Office meets Silicon Valley | 01:46 |
| 17 | 22:17 | People churn | 01:36 |
| 18 | 23:52 | Uniform compensation | 02:01 |
| 19 | 25:53 | We're all owners in some way | 01:40 |
| 20 | 27:33 | Sponsor: CodeRabbit | 01:07 |
| 21 | 28:40 | Dave Pacheco on Update | 01:29 |
| 22 | 30:09 | It's Mupdate | 01:37 |
| 23 | 31:47 | What's an "Update"? | 02:44 |
| 24 | 34:31 | Air gap users | 00:47 |
| 25 | 35:18 | Update on Hubris | 02:13 |
| 26 | 37:31 | Update without rebooting | 03:24 |
| 27 | 40:55 | Failure to Update | 04:40 |
| 28 | 45:35 | What if you didn't have to reboot? | 02:15 |
| 29 | 47:50 | New novel testing | 02:52 |
| 30 | 50:42 | Dave and Bryan is history | 02:25 |
| 31 | 53:07 | Solving these problems with Rust | 04:37 |
| 32 | 57:44 | Dave on OxCon | 01:49 |
| 33 | 59:33 | Ben Leonard on Oxide's design | 01:01 |
| 34 | 1:00:34 | Subtle tweaks | 00:41 |
| 35 | 1:01:14 | Product is the design | 01:55 |
| 36 | 1:03:09 | Designing Oxide's rack | 03:23 |
| 37 | 1:06:32 | Designing the unseen hardware | 01:53 |
| 38 | 1:08:24 | Oxide's values to design values | 01:30 |
| 39 | 1:09:54 | Properly excited | 02:05 |
| 40 | 1:11:59 | It's the little things | 00:57 |
| 41 | 1:12:56 | Is growth exciting? | 01:06 |
| 42 | 1:14:02 | Super awesome and beautiful | 00:33 |
| 43 | 1:14:35 | Closing thoughts and stuff | 01:38 |
Matthew Sanabria (Sep 27 2025 at 00:39):Great episode! I think you all covered 3 great areas of the Oxide stack.
Colin Dean (Oct 06 2025 at 14:45):I really enjoyed this episode a lot.
Lars Ellingsen (Oct 07 2025 at 23:07):Me too. If my skills overlapped I’d definitely apply there, it sounds like a great place to work all around.
Also, as a fully remote employee who wants to stay that way, +1 for offsites/in-person gatherings being very helpful
Ron Waldon-Howe (Oct 07 2025 at 23:16):It's a little disappointing to still encounter guests that still don't have a non-Xitter social presence
No, LinkedIn doesn't count, don't "at" me :P
But at least they have a GitHub :)
Ron Waldon-Howe (Oct 07 2025 at 23:17):@Matthew Sanabria maybe Oxide should host their own Mastodon on a rack, and provide staff (and only staff) with an account? :)
Matthew Sanabria (Oct 08 2025 at 00:50):Ron Waldon-Howe said:
Matthew Sanabria maybe Oxide should host their own Mastodon on a rack, and provide staff (and only staff) with an account? :)
That would be cool! I want to run my Bluesky PDS on Oxide but haven't gotten around to it.
Ron Waldon-Howe (Oct 08 2025 at 01:10):oh yeah, Bluesky is probably the more obvious Xitter alternative given that it's actually popular and _some_ people have heard of it :P
Matthew Sanabria (Oct 08 2025 at 01:17):Yeah haha. Although I'm not finding Bluesky to be as diverse yet. Too much of an echo chamber tech crowd for now.
Matthew Sanabria (Oct 08 2025 at 01:19):Oddly enough I'm finding LinkedIn to be good generally and Mastodon to be good for tech specific things. Like to actually get some niche tech reply.
Ron Waldon-Howe (Oct 08 2025 at 01:23):yeah, every time i get a reply from a Mastodon instance i've never heard of, it amazes me
federation actually works :)
Matthew Sanabria (Oct 08 2025 at 01:24):It really does. If you tag your post with a specific hashtag you'll likely get the eyes you're looking for.
Don MacKinnon (Oct 08 2025 at 21:02):A good portion of tech folks are on Bsky but getting actual conversations going is hit or miss, decent number of accounts but activity isn't consistent. I stopped being active on Twitter after it got bought.
Matthew Sanabria (Oct 08 2025 at 21:20):Agreed. Oh I should note that if you listened to this episode and have Oxide questions I'm happy to chat about them.
Disclaimer being I work at Oxide.
Owen Valentine (Oct 13 2025 at 09:14):This is off-topic entirely, but Cliff Biffle is a fantastic name
Daniel Buckmaster (Oct 24 2025 at 06:47):@Matthew Sanabria does Oxide use a particular planning methodology like OKRs?
I only thought to ask because someone recommended I read Measure What Matters. It talks about a lot of companies who use OKRs, and it made me curious. OKRs sound like they'd be a good fit for Oxide's culture, but I'd expect the founders have strong opinions that don't involve subscribing to named and acronymmed management philosophies :laughing:
Matthew Sanabria (Oct 24 2025 at 13:14):We don't use OKRs in the strict definition of them. We instead write Request for Discussion (RFD) documents to describe what, why, and how we're trying to build and create tickets to track the work for it. Generally the work is tied to a release of Oxide and has things that we'll use to measure that the work was successful.
Matthew Sanabria (Oct 24 2025 at 13:14):But there's no top-level OKR like at other places. Steve and Bryan give us our priorities and we're left to execute on them.
Ron Waldon-Howe (Oct 24 2025 at 21:31):We've cargo culted OKRs for a few years now where I work
Ideally, missing a goal would trigger a conversation about work load, focus, assistance, etc
But they also seem very easy to weaponise against you if the company needs reasons to fire you
Daniel Buckmaster (Oct 25 2025 at 02:31):Interesting that RFDs can fill that role, I guess it makes total sense given the overlapping aims of transparency, alignment, focus etc.
In my current headspace I would love a podcast episode about the different management approaches that people are Oxide have encountered, it seems like you all have a great mix of experiences and opinions. But I can understand that would probably be deathly boring to everyone else :joy:
Daniel Buckmaster (Oct 25 2025 at 02:31):@Ron Waldon-Howe yes I doubt any process can really produce good results independent of a culture of people who care and act in good faith!
Ron Waldon-Howe (Oct 25 2025 at 03:33):Oh, I've been meaning to ask: what's the intellectual property agreement at Oxide? Is it like https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement or will the company sue you if you claim to own a 2 line change to your dotfiles? (probably not the latter)
Matthew Sanabria (Oct 29 2025 at 05:00):Daniel Buckmaster said:
Interesting that RFDs can fill that role, I guess it makes total sense given the overlapping aims of transparency, alignment, focus etc.
In my current headspace I would love a podcast episode about the different management approaches that people are Oxide have encountered, it seems like you all have a great mix of experiences and opinions. But I can understand that would probably be deathly boring to everyone else :joy:
That would be a good topic!
Matthew Sanabria (Oct 29 2025 at 05:01):Ron Waldon-Howe said:
Oh, I've been meaning to ask: what's the intellectual property agreement at Oxide? Is it like https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement or will the company sue you if you claim to own a 2 line change to your dotfiles? (probably not the latter)
I haven't seen anything that suggests an issue here. Most things are open source under a pretty permissive license.
Ron Waldon-Howe (Oct 29 2025 at 05:01):Ah, of course, open source
Ron Waldon-Howe (Oct 29 2025 at 05:02):I'm on one of our internal cloud platform teams, so nothing we sell or make money from, and trying to get clearance for us to be open by default has been like pulling teeth
Matthew Sanabria (Oct 29 2025 at 05:41):That's really unfortunate. Especially because even just publishing that software gives you a great conversation piece with customers. Not to mention it's a good way to showcase your work.
Last updated: Dec 16 2025 at 01:26 UTC