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**Adam Stacoviak:** What has it been like casting the vision for it and getting feedback from the team? Because I'm thinking culture, I'm thinking the process of getting feedback on any idea... Because you're laying out all this groundwork, and you're doing all the work to kind of get to a direction. What is it like to... |
**Dave Pacheco:** It's great. I mean, I don't know if you all talked about the RFD process, but... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The RFD process, yeah. |
**Dave Pacheco:** So when I started on this, the first step was writing an RFD. I think it's 4.18, if you want to find that... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is this public, the RFDs? |
**Dave Pacheco:** Some of them are and some of them aren't. I don't know what that one is. It probably could be, if we want it to be. |
There's nothing particularly sensitive in it. But it's kind of laying out where we are. Lay of the land, this is where we are, these are the problems, here's where we're trying to go... And it was very specific in some ways. It was like this idea of plan-execute pattern, and the automation has to be safe, and all this ... |
\[52:24\] So that was the first step, is getting everyone aligned on the vision. And that RFD itself was a team effort. I drafted this first version, but people are looking at that... And I think broadly, there were no surprises there. Everyone was like "Yeah, this all makes sense." And then that process just keeps hap... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure. We know that Rust is a foundational language here, obviously. We talked about this being somewhat of a novel problem... How is Rust uniquely positioned to help solve this problem? Like, what about Rust makes this problem easier than another language that you may choose to do this with? |
**Dave Pacheco:** Yeah. So the big thing for me about Rust, that I really love and I think that's been huge for Oxide, is its ability to help us ensure things, especially at build time, that need to be true of the system. That sounds really vague, but what I mean is you can catch so many problems early. And everyone ta... |
And it sounds so low-level, but that's what a lot -- like, it's extending that same idea and applying those same tools to do it, that allows us to say "If you try to evolve the API in a backwards-incompatible way that won't work at upgrade time, depending on how you do it, you might get a build failure." You'll at leas... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gush, man. Gush. |
**Dave Pacheco:** So one of the first things that I built here with Adam Leventhal is something called Dropshot, which basically lets you write an HTTP server and then generate an open API spec from the code. And then we feed that into something called Progenitor, which generates the clients for it. But that alone mean... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I call them enums... |
**Dave Pacheco:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Just sayin'. |
**Dave Pacheco:** Yeah. So anyway, we ended up extending that, so now that's how we do this versioning stuff, is we have a bunch of these open API specs that are the ones that this thing supports... And then we know if you've changed it, because we know if it generates a different thing, then you've changed it incompat... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gush a little bit more on this then. Speak to your confidence in the code you write because it's Rust. I'll just -- easy shot you that one. |
**Dave Pacheco:** Yeah. I mean, I'm reluctant to make any bold claims about the correctness of the code I write, lest I immediately walk back in there and there's some horrible thing happening... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure. If the fans spin, you know that's why. |
**Dave Pacheco:** \[56:07\] But I mean, I'll say this... There's a lot of changes I've been able to make where I'll go work on the code for like four hours, and when it compiles, I know it's already correct. I know I haven't broken anything. And it's not as simple -- I know there's the cartoonish version, "if it compil... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No nightmares. |
**Dave Pacheco:** My previous experience was in Node.js, and it was the complete opposite of this. And part of the reason I love Rust is by the time we got to the end of the road at my last job when we were using Node.js everywhere, every single JavaScript function we had started with like 30 assertions about the types... |
And that gets back to why I think Rust is so valuable for this problem space, is that these things are so complicated... By allowing us to encode all these constraints into build time constraints, that allows us to evolve the software so much faster, and with so much more confidence. Someone can come in here and make a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's huge. Right on, man. What else? Anything? |
**Jerod Santo:** Tell us about OxCon. |
**Dave Pacheco:** OxCon. OxCon is awesome. So this has been something we've been doing for a while, and this is something we -- it's very similar to something we did at Joyent, these sort of company-wide meetups, engineering-wide meetups. For a remote company, it works really well to be remote basically all the time, b... |
So there's a mix of the structured time that we have... You know, Brian and Steve talking about all the exciting stuff over the last year. It's inspiring for people, it sort of gets everyone ginned up to talk about everything that we got to go do... And then there are other good, company-wide sessions talking about imp... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's the best. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It is the best. |
**Dave Pacheco:** Yeah, right? So that's huge... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Conference talks, not really... Hallway track only. Keynotes only, and then hallway track. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's our move. |
**Dave Pacheco:** This is so much more -- it's getting more mature and professionalized. We never had a stage before... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No? |
**Dave Pacheco:** We never had like pro A/V before... So this whole week is a little bit of a dream. OxCon already feels different. And then we've got the stage there, and then it like rained in the Bay Area in September this morning, and I was like "Am I dreaming, or what's going on here?" |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Dave Pacheco:** But it's a good time. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Thanks, Dave. |
**Dave Pacheco:** Thank you. I appreciate it. |
**Jerod Santo:** Thanks. It's been awesome. |
**Break**: \[59:28\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** One of the things that stands out about Oxide is its design. I think you can have a good company, a successful company, but every company that's successful is set apart by its design. Can you talk about how you came to be here at Oxide, and the design story behind the brand? |
**Ben Leonard:** Yeah. So I was working at a branding agency called Pentagram. Oxide was my last branding project. I was planning on leaving to work as a freelancer. I'd been at Pentagram for four or five years, I was ready to move on. And it just so happened that Oxide were looking for a designer just as I was leaving... |
Because what would happen is you'd work on these brands and then you'd throw it over the fence, and then you'd check in on it like two years later, like "What have they done to my baby?" |
**Jerod Santo:** They destroyed it. |
**Ben Leonard:** "My boy, my boy...!" And so it was a unique opportunity to continue it on. And I'm kind of -- I was telling you about this before, I'm relentless. I like to fiddle with things. |
**Jerod Santo:** You keep working on it. |
**Ben Leonard:** Yeah, I kind of get bored of it as well, so I just want to tweak something... Recently, we made a modification to the logo that most people wouldn't even notice. It's slightly thicker, but it's something that's been bugging me this entire time... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I noticed. |
**Ben Leonard:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. |
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