Oxide's Engineers and Designer on OxCon, Series B, and Crossing the Chasm

Oxide's Engineering and Culture

• 💡 Cliff Biffle discusses his work on low-level firmware, including the boot process before the main CPU powers on, and the importance of Rust for firmware development.
• 🧠 Oxide fosters a strong writing culture, evident in their application process and living documentation, which helps build consensus and share knowledge.
• 🚀 Cliff highlights the challenge and passion of building an engineering organization from a small team to its current size, focusing on processes and documentation to support growth.
• 🛠️ The company uses Rust for most of its firmware, with a small, well-tested C component for the legacy SunOS-based Helios OS.

The "Update" System and Challenges

• 🎯 Dave Pacheco leads the development of Oxide's "Update" system, aiming for self-service updates for the Oxide rack.
• 🚗 The current support-driven update process is being replaced by an API-driven system, likened to replacing car parts while driving or plane parts mid-flight.
• ⚙️ Updating an Oxide system involves hundreds of components, including service processors, root of trust, and host OS, bundled into large update files.
• 🔒 The current update model supports air-gapped environments, prioritizing security and privacy by not requiring direct internet connectivity for the rack.
• 🚫 The goal is to achieve non-disruptive updates, where customer VMs are live-migrated off sleds before they are rebooted, a significant engineering challenge.

Design, Brand, and Company Values

• ✨ Ben Leonard oversees brand and design, emphasizing that the product itself is the design, with a unified UI design system across the website and web console.
• 🎨 Oxide's design language blends old and new, with a retro-futuristic aesthetic reflected in its branding, like the signature green color.
• 🤝 The company values a uniform compensation structure and an ownership mentality, fostering a sense of shared purpose.
• 📈 Ben finds fulfillment in elevating often-overlooked objects and designs, bringing creativity to hardware and industrial design.
• 🚀 Oxide's annual OxCon conference provides valuable in-person time for camaraderie, collaboration, and aligning on company vision and projects.