Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill Twitter profile

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 months

How it started, how it's going

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

This photo of Dr. Katie Bouman seeing the first image of a black hole upon reconstruction is perhaps the most evocative photo of intellectual breakthrough that I have seen -- of anyone, ever. 1/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

6 years

How about a conference called "In Retrospect" in which presenters revisit talks they've given years prior -- and describe how their thinking has evolved since?

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

@AlannaBennett Early in my career, my mother was visiting my (cluttered) office and left a note on the whiteboard: "Note to Bryan's colleagues: he was not raised like this."

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

8 years

Real reason we open sourced everything: it's easier to search the internet than it was to search our internal wiki

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

"Mistakes are expected, respected, inspected, and corrected." -- words to live by from my 7th grade son's math teacher

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

A defining aspect of the Theranos failure is that everyone deferred to someone else in terms of technical diligence, collectively dismissing as malcontents those technologists who actually HAD dug deep and came away unconvinced. Do you see why I am bringing this up, web3?

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

If you are a C or C++ programmer somehow still on the fence about whether or not you should take #rustlang seriously, consider this piece from Cliff Biffle an absolute must-read:

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

Santa came early to @oxidecomputer -- and we must have been pretty nice, because it powered on and the software came up!

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 months

I can no longer contain my thoughts on the A's temporary move to Sacramento, and want to get a couple of things out there. So with my apologies, a thread... 1/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

Comically bad leadership advice from the (fired) CEO of WordPerfect, ca. 1994

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

6 years

Am waiting for the year that reInvent goes full Red Wedding, locking the doors and announcing that every attendee's product or service is now a forthcoming AWS offering. Or maybe that was this year?

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

So, my thoughts on engineering performance management have always been a bit idiosyncratic, but Matt's tweets today have me reflecting, so... storytime. 1/

Matt Klein

@mattklein123

5 years

@bcantrill @adamhjk I've seen this talk, and not surprisingly it's close to my own thinking and experience. Can you summarize the evolution in your thinking?

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

1 year

Next week, the most arrogant person I have ever met in my life (yes, that's really saying something!) is going to release a programming platform that will offer a "100X" gain in productivity -- and I'm not sure there's enough time to make all of the popcorn I will need

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

TIL that Edsger Dijkstra apparently believed that I and all of my fellow Gen X programmers were "mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration"

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

There is a regrettable idea that system software is "done." I was told the same thing in 1996 (and in the same breath, advised to not pursue system software). So for whomever needs to hear it: system software was not done then -- and it is emphatically not done now!

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

Eight-year-old told me that she and her friend made a club to make other clubs (they claim to have made 26 clubs so far!), and I realize that she has created the elementary school equivalent of the Linux Foundation

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

Today is my last day at Joyent. On becoming an ex-Joyeur:

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

The 8-year-old, apparently discovering some of my history online: "I thought Sun Microsystems was a brewery!"

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

1. Software engineers emphatically can suffer from Writer's Block 2. The Pandemic made this much more acute 3. We do ourselves a disservice by not talking about it

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

We started @oxidecomputer ! On the soul of a new computer company:

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

After over two decades in Silicon Valley, TODAY I FINALLY ARRIVED

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

Rust after the honeymoon:

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

6 years

I am excited to announce that I will be returning to Oracle to head up their new unikernel initiative!

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

2 years

My 9-year-old daughter has been following the Okta outage closely (don't ask). Tonight, she asked me to read their message; her reaction: "They are using too many fancy words. They got hacked." Out of the mouths of babes!

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

6 years

When Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, I jokingly said that there were three things that he needed to do to make Microsoft relevant again -- none of which he would do. As of this morning, he's done all three.

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

Looking forward to 2020, the year those laggards in agriculture finally adopt Itanium!

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

1. What are you most proud of in the last six months? 2. What did you learn? 3. Where did you struggle? 4. What are you anxious about in the coming six months? 5. What are you excited about in the coming six months? 11/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

10 years

If this is your first tech bubble, let me give you some advice that was once given to me: enjoy the party, but dance close to the door

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

@manymanywords Once had an exec try to browbeat me with his insane ideas about how I should be running my team; surprised myself when I began my (furious) response with, "Look, sport..."

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

2 years

Number of days since we discovered a previously unknown CPU core with a new instruction set in the @oxidecomputer rack: 0

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

Becoming concerned that my daughter is going to rebel by growing up to be an Oracle license auditor

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

I can't speak for my co-founders and co-workers, but there were many factors that went into my own decision to start a company/join a startup -- and the long-term capital gains tax rate was emphatically not among them

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

6 years

Falling in love with Rust:

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

If you're tempted to blame a team for a startup's failure, please don't: success is often due to a great team -- but failure is almost always due to bad leadership

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

Whenever I see a "// TODO: Add error handling.", I am reminded why the future of infrastructure software belongs to Rust.

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

A VC firm that confidently told us that we would "never raise" just asked me if I'm "open" to giving product feedback to one of their portfolio companies. NOT TODAY, SATAN!

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

I have always felt that "Artificial Intelligence" is a gross misnomer -- and that we would all be much better served if we called it what it is: automated pattern recognition.

Melanie Mitchell

@MelMitchell1

3 years

"Herbert Simon said we should call it 'complex information processing.' What would the world be like if it was called that instead?"

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

My thirteen-year-old is trolling me by creating fan accounts ("I'm just @bcantrill 's #1 fan") and then liking tweets of mine that he thinks are stinkers -- and I feel woefully unprepared for this by parenting books

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

@jessfraz Upon joining Sun in 1996, my first project in kernel development was to allow the operating system clock interrupt rate to be made more fine-grained. 1/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

That time we open sourced a dependency to not have to deal with the necessary key management to get a GitHub workflow to pull a git submodule from a private repo

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

6 months

How it started, how it's going

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

2 years

I want to make a software engineering magic 8-ball where every answer is "It depends"

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

1 year

You know, this ChatGPT thing is actually pretty good!

Sam Altman

@sama

1 year

we had a significant issue in ChatGPT due to a bug in an open source library, for which a fix has now been released and we have just finished validating. a small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history. we feel awful about this.

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

"Scared Straight", but for teenagers starting to experiment with C++

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

Let us choose to collectively ignore these detractors -- and choose instead to be inspired by not just the achievement of Dr. Bouman's team, but by the incomparable elation of breakthrough, as epitomized by Dr. Bouman herself. 8/8

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

When the Rust compiler gives you an error message that begins with "First, ...", it's like your mother calling you by your full name: you know you're in trouble

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

As it apparently needs to be said: open source relicensing is a clear indicator that a company is shifting from growing its community to melting it down for scrap

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

6 years

Just because I sometimes need to remind myself: the role of a leader -- any leader -- is to encourage autonomy, foster mastery, and inspire purpose.

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

Years ago, during Sun's worst quality crisis (the infamous e-cache parity error that plagued the UltraSPARC-II), one of the physicists working on the problem strongly recommended that I read John Godson's 1975 book, "The Rise and Fall of the DC-10" 1/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

I'm three years into Rust and every long day in the saddle still seems to have some small moment of new joy; are others finding the same?

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

An excellent, damning piece on Stallman's loathsome worldview that we should find not merely embarrassing but shameful: why have we not acted? Why have we not punished @fsf for its inaction? Why do we tolerate those who defend and harbor him?

Renowned MIT Scientist Defends Epstein: Victims Were ‘Entirely Willing’

MIT bigwig Richard Stallman dismissed Epstein’s underage victims in emails and defended child pornography on his blog.

www.thedailybeast.com

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

Some companies covet a particular domain name; at @oxidecomputer we covet... nerdier things.

Joshua M. Clulow

@jmclulow

5 years

#define PCI_VENDOR_ID_OXIDE 0x1DE

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

Compensation as a reflection of values:

Compensation as a Reflection of Values / Oxide

Our thoughts on compensation, and how they reflect Oxide's values.

oxide.computer

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

So, I have been busy starting some big things with @jessfraz and @sdtuck . More details coming tomorrow, but for now, a (literal) teaser:

Google Podcasts

With Google Podcasts, you can find and listen to the world's podcasts for free.

podcasts.google.com

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

My talk on @oxidecomputer at Stanford's EE380 seminar is now online -- including why we're excited about @rustlang , @risc_v , @bluespec , #Yosys , @talkingtalk , @osfc_io , and more:

Stanford Seminar - The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer

Bryan CantrillOxide Computer CompanyFebruary 26, 2020While our software systems have become increasingly elastic, the physical substrate available to run tha...

www.youtube.com

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

2 years

How it started, how it's going

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 months

The only thing to know about the A's is that the ownership is INCOMPETENT. I'm not talking routine incompetence -- this is grand, eye-watering, paint-peeling incompetence. When seeking explanations for their actions, don't overthink it: it is INCOMPETENCE every single time. 2/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

So, this amazing video has been going around for the last day (and I have probably watched it a dozen times!), but it has also prompted some thoughts... 1/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 months

You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

MS-DOS/v4.0/src/CMD/EDLIN/EDLIN.ASM at main · microsoft/MS-DOS

The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25, 2.0, and 4.0 for reference purposes - microsoft/MS-DOS

github.com

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

1 year

"I won't lie there's a learning curve to the programming platform we're going to reveal on Tuesday at 10:59am PT. It's a pure Java API, but there are multiple layers of concepts that are completely new. This can only be justified if the platform confers extreme advantages. 100x."

chaotic memes

@memechaotic

1 year

What is he saying?

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

Hot damn is Rust ever nice.

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

2 years

Last night, my 17-year-old saw the @oxidecomputer rack for the first time. He has a great aesthetic sense, but no particular interest in computing; it felt surprisingly gratifying to see him totally blown away by what our team has built. Can't wait to get it out there!

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

2 years

In virtually any software project, there is the primary language -- and then one or two (or more) additional languages for building, tooling, etc. Rust's extraordinary versatility means that it can replace all of these: projects can reasonably be entirely Rust + declarative files

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

2 years

Now that this platform is being bought by a freedom maximalist, does this mean we can expect a free and open Twitter API?

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

OH: "Just as they say you're never more than six feet from a spider, you're probably never more than six feet from a microcontroller -- and it's best not to think about how much more benign the spiders are."

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

Anyone who has had such a moment in their life -- of prolonged intellectual struggle followed by breakthrough -- recognizes something of themselves in this picture of Dr. Bouman. 4/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

My observation would be that anyone minimizing Dr. Bouman upon seeing this photo must not have had that feeling themselves; for these embittered few, the feeling of breakthrough must be as foreign as the specifics of interferometry used to achieve it. 7/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

OH -- and sadly true: glibc: we will use this hardware feature to work around a software performance issue rust: we will complicate our software to work around glibc's use of this hardware feature processor vendor: we will disable this hardware feature to avoid software issues

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

My kind of repo!

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

I really want to stop being the internet's Sun historian -- but I really need the internet to become slightly less ignorant of Sun's history

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

Daniel Pink summarizes these motivators concisely: people are motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose. 4/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 months

@Vivek @EduOverStadiums @RiverCats @lyricsborn @OaklandBallers A final, personal note: this is GUTTING for A's fans. My kids (like so many!) grew up at the Coliseum. The team being ripped away is like someone breaking into your house and desecrating your family album: we may move on, but we will never forget. 14/14

Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

8 months

Happened across this old photo when looking for something else -- and it really struck me that for the rest of my life, I will be reminded what John Fisher took away.

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

6 years

Open source confronts its midlife crisis: ht: @adamhjk @rhatr @sogrady

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

If you fly an otherwise promising startup into the side of a mountain, and then are tempted to later write think pieces on how companies and teams should be built, maybe the first one to write is what the hell happened to yours?

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

I wrote code today, and it felt so goddamned good that I want an "I coded" sticker

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

To the contrary: at @oxidecomputer , we EXPLICITLY ask people when they were unhappiest (and why). We ask this not to seek denigration of past employers, but rather to understand the degree to which a candidate shares our values. Unhappy times are often very revealing!

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

@nntaleb

3 years

When trying to hire someone, induce the person to say something negative about a past employer. If you succeed, stay away.

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

6 years

Everything that drives me nuts about the Google SRE book is embodied in this single (unnecessary) sentence in Chapter 18:

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

Crossing the streams

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

7 months

Despite the fact that making references to obscure SNL skits from the 1980s has landed me in plenty of hot water, I reference this sketch at least annually

Rex Chapman🏇🏼

@RexChapman

7 months

SNL already did it…

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

As he watched the towers fall on 9/11, Rabbi Irwin Kula famously observed to himself that "religion did this"; watching this horror unfold I am left with a similarly troubling conclusion: social media did this.

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

Me running "git blame"

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

That is why this photo resonates; not just because of Dr. Bouman's team's work (though that is obviously incredible!) but because her moment of joy inspires us -- all of us -- to strive for our own breakthroughs. 5/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 months

How does this endure? If a CEO explained a decline in revenue by BLAMING THE CUSTOMERS, the board would (rightfully) fire them. But John Fisher is not a CEO: he is just a grown child -- the only thing he knows how to do is hoard the spoils of his birth. 3/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

2 years

So, I just learned -- through what can fairly be called an @oxidecomputer group intervention -- that I have been mispronouncing a particular word for my entire adult life. Before I reveal it, I'm curious if this has happened to others -- and if so, what word?

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

Hot take: this otherwise excellent postmortem is too forgiving of PostgreSQL; transaction ID wraparound autovacuum is a nasty failure mode that too many learn about only when their own production systems are capsized by it!

What We Learned from the Recent Mandrill Outage | Mailchimp

Following a recent outage, we committed to sharing what we learned with our customers.

mailchimp.com

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

@jessfraz 1. Systems can work by accident (potentially for years!) 20/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

@stefanlasiewski @AlannaBennett Oh, I knew better than to try that, which would have summoned a Cat 5 hurricane of maternal reproach!

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

2 years

Beloved, struggling company trashed by a sociopathic delusional narcissistic megalomaniac? Tweeps: Sun alumni are here for you! You will always have the memories of what was, and you will take what what you loved to the companies that you join -- and the startups you create! 💙

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

1 year

A decade ago, I gave a talk on corporate open source anti-patterns -- saying that I would return in a decade and describe any new mistakes. A decade later, new mistakes have emphatically been made; it feels like it might be time for that update I promised?

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

It is a look that says, in short: "IT WORKED!" 3/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

It captures the moment of breakthrough just perfectly: the delighted grin; the eyes that show equal part elation and relief; the clasped hands that still reflect the intense anxiety of just seconds prior. 2/

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

OH Rust wisdom: "Clone first, optimize later"

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

4 years

Asked the kids to "smile and say Oxide!"; 16-year-old instead said "Pied Piper!", which gives me strange paternal pride

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

Yo dawg I heard you like breakout dongles...

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

5 years

Good thing Sun filled out its organ donor card, I guess.

Cloudflare

@Cloudflare

5 years

We recently registered the trademark for “The Network is the Computer,” to encompass how Cloudflare is utilizing its network to pave the way for the future of the Internet.

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Bryan Cantrill

@bcantrill

3 years

Surprised to find one of the best early histories of Sun in Randall Stross's 1993 book on Steve Jobs and NeXT -- though perhaps the book itself is explaining why I shouldn't be?