Notices by Bryan Cantrill (bcantrill@mastodon.social)

On Monday, @ahl and I will be joined by members of the Oxide team to talk about a doozy: an 18-year-old ZFS data corruption bug that we recently nailed. We'll be at a special Europe-friendly time: 9a Pacific/noon Eastern/5p GMT -- join us for the wild tale!

https://discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?event=1442398752215400459

There's There's an Oakland Ballers parade tomorrow to celebrate their magical season, and it affords an opportunity to reflect on why this team is so meaningful to Oakland

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2025/10/04/a-parade-in-oakland/

Some news from @oxidecomputer: we got a raise! Our annual salary now stands at $235K.

https://oxide.computer/blog/oxides-compensation-model-how-is-it-going

Recently, @shanselman gave a stirring TEDx talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVG8W-0p6vg

The talk tacks into many of the themes that @ahl and I have discussed over the years,; on the next episode of Oxide an d Friends, Scott is going to join us to elaborate on the talk, and to reflect on the promises of tech -- both where it has delivered (not insignificant!) and where it has fallen short. Join us, Monday, 5p Pacific:

https://discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?event=1402457889830080563

Recently, Cockroach Labs has announced a transition to becoming an entirely proprietary software company. But where does that leave Oxide, which has used CockroachDB as the data repository for our control plane?

Surprising absolutely no one, @ahl and I are going to pick this up on the next Oxide and Friends, where we'll be joined by @dap to discuss our history and disposition with respect to CockroachDB. Join us: Monday, 5p Pacific!

https://discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?event=1274122729993277470

Background:

https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0508

Recently, the software world was rocked by the discovery of a backdoor in XZ Utils. The backdoor represents many stories, but behind all of them is the story of a single Postgres developer, vexed by a relatable problem: "why is it taking so long to login?!"

On the next Oxide and Friends, @ahl and I are thrilled to be joined by that developer, @AndresFreundTec, the discoverer of the XZ backdoor. Join us on April 8th at 5p Pacific to hear this extraordinary story!

https://discord.gg/SAsE6G6W?event=1224880997762338856

@AndresFreundTec @ahl I was going to say the same, but about transaction ID wraparound autovacuum!

As it apparently needs to be said: An organization that both eschews traditional hierarchy and mandates stack ranking is a guaranteed hot mess

This IEEE Spectrum piece is absolutely unhinged -- and by the same absurd logic, we would have banned BBSs in the 1980s because kids (🙋♂️) were using them to find copies of The Anarchist Cookbook.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/open-source-ai-2666932122

Look, I know I'm a cheap date on a Friday night -- but this stress test is just way too much fun to watch

Many years ago, I made two decisions about my public speaking: that all my talks would be recorded and publicly available -- and that I wouldn't give the same talk twice. The result has been a wide variety of talks; to help folks navigate them all, I collected them -- and have kept the list updated ever since.

I mention this, because inspired by the kind words of @nnungest, @herrbischoff, and @troglobit, I just updated the list for 2023:

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2018/02/03/talks/

Enjoy -- and thank you!

I have recovered the original video from my "Corporate Open Source Anti-patterns: Doing it wrong" talk from FISL in 2012! I will be giving an update of this talk (with many new anti-patterns!) at P99 CONF on October 19th -- it's online and free!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anXKAcrJ5Wc

@lanodan @rain They are honestly just different ways for stopping and resuming a process; the reason to separate them is to allow them to co-exist. For more details, I would point you to seminal work of the late Roger Faulkner: https://www.usenix.org/memoriam-roger-faulkner

@rain 🤣 "In THIS house, under THIS roof, we do not use job control for debugging!"

I reminisced a bit after the 5th anniversary (15 years ago!), describing in particular the harrowing day before we integrated. 3/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/09/03/happy-5th-birthday-dtrace/

That day continues to be memorable; @ahl and I talked about it on a recent episode of Oxide and Friends. 4/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3qZJBfHI0Y&t=988s

First, to take you back to 2003, read the mail we sent out after we landed in the gate: 2/ http://dtrace.org/resources/bmc/houston.txt

Two decades ago today, DTrace integrated into the operating system. Much has changed in the last 20 years -- but one thing has remained true: we ourselves still use it on a daily basis. With your forgiveness, a short thread... 1/

Where is "single-threaded WAL replay"? The Mariana Trench?

Every year on the first day of school, we have the kids pose for a photo and indicate their new grade with their fingers -- but this year we needed some neighborhood help for our high school junior