From being a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems to co-founding Oxide Computer Company to build a new kind of server, Bryan joins the show to chat about being told that he’s on a suicide mission when starting Oxide, the moment he felt “I’m actually living HBO Silicon Valley”, and lessons from Sun. And much more.

Chapters:

(00:02:24) The Origin of Bryan's Nom-de-Guerre: "Colonel of Data Corruption"
(00:04:02) What Debugging Performance Issues at Twitter in the Early Days Revealed About Silicon Valley
(00:13:37) Value of Formal Education and the Experience That Everyone Should Have
(00:16:02) Balancing Following One's Passion vs. Having Stability
(00:21:14) What Shaped Bryan's Sense of Integrity
(00:25:39) The Moments When Values Are Instilled
(00:30:25) The Dark Side of Tech
(00:35:12) "Economic Opportunities Attract Economic Opportunists"
(00:40:35) The Origins of Oxide Computers
(00:50:20) Building the A-Team
(00:52:18) "Compaq Was the Most Successful Startup"
(00:55:51) The Venture Capitalist's Dilemma
(01:03:04) Being Told "You're on a Suicide Mission"
(01:07:12) The Lifestyle of the "Lifestyle Business"
(01:09:30) The Harsh Reality of Raising Venture Capital
(01:13:12) The Challenges of Building Hardware
(01:16:36) Why You Should Think About Not Only Gross Margin but Net Margin
(01:19:14) Hardware and Software Co-Design
(01:22:06) The Frustrations of Infrastructure Deployment
(01:26:46) Finding the Right VCs
(01:28:16) "Oh My God, I'm Actually Living HBO Silicon Valley"
(01:33:12) Oxide's Principles and Lessons from Sun Microsystems
(01:39:51) Sun's Unspoken Values
(01:45:03) Sun's Legacy of Empowering Employees
(01:48:53) Sun's Missed Opportunities
(01:53:04) The Reason Why Sun Survived the Dot-Com Crash
(01:56:21) "God Bless the Early Adopters"
(01:57:39) A Tweet from Shopify's CEO
(02:01:24) The Hard Thing About Hard Things
(02:12:55) The Hardest Moment in Oxide's History

Show Notes:

- Oxide’s principles: https://oxide.computer/principles

- Requests for Discussion (RFDs): https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/

- Toby’s tweet: https://x.com/tobi/status/1793798092212367669

- Bryan on twitter: https://x.com/bcantrill

Stay in touch:

👋 Make Ronak’s day by leaving us a review and let us know who we should talk to next! hello@softwaremisadventures.com

Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

From writing the first lines of Kafka over a Christmas break as a LinkedIn engineer to running a public company as the CEO of Confluent, Jay joins the show to chat about how he and his co-founders convinced investors to take a chance on their vision, what many engineers get wrong about communication, and why engineers can make great CEOs - even when coding is not in the job description. And much more.

Segments:

(00:01:16) The Shaved Head Bet
(00:04:07) Fundraising
(00:12:16) The Role of Technical Background in VCs
(00:15:48) The power of believing in the possibility of important changes
(00:18:29) The Journey to starting Confluent
(00:27:11) Kafka's Controversial Beginnings
(00:34:30) Effective Communication in Engineering
(00:44:20) The Early Days of Kafka
(00:48:31) The Power of Storytelling
(00:57:19) Early days of Confluent
(01:03:06) Do Engineers Make Good CEOs?
(01:07:59) A Typical Day in the Life of a CEO
(01:12:24) The Evolution of Data Streaming

Show Notes:
- “The log” blog post that solidified Jay and his co-founders' conviction to found Confluent: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying

- Jay on twitter: https://x.com/jaykreps

Stay in touch:
👋 Make Ronak’s day by leaving us a review and let us know who we should talk to next! hello@softwaremisadventures.com

Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

If you’ve worked on data problems, you probably have heard of Airflow and Superset, two powerful tools that have cemented their place in the data ecosystem. Building successful open-source software is no easy feat, and even fewer engineers have done this back to back. In part 2 of the conversation, we talk about Max’s journey in open source.

Segments:

(00:03:27) “Project-Community Fit” in Open Source
(00:08:31) Fostering Relationships in Open Source
(00:10:58) Dealing with Trolls
(00:13:40) Attributes of Good Open Source Contributors
(00:20:01) How to Get Started with Contributing
(00:27:58) Origin Stories of Airflow and Superset
(00:33:27) Biggest Surprise since Founding a VC-backed Company?
(00:38:47) Picking What to Work On
(00:41:46) Advice to Engineers for Building the Next Airflow/Superset?
(00:42:35) The 2 New Open Source Projects that Max is Starting
(00:52:10) Challenges of Being a Founder
(00:57:38) Open Sourcing Ideas

Show Notes:

Part 1 of our conversation: https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/maxime-beauchemin-llm-ready
Max on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maximebeauchemin/
SQL All Stars: https://github.com/preset-io/allstars
Governator: https://github.com/mistercrunch/governator

Stay in touch:

👋 Make Ronak’s day by leaving us a review and let us know who we should talk to next! hello@softwaremisadventures.com