I Know This! (Purpose-built systems with general-purpose guts)

Feb 8, 2022

The discussion dives into the mixed feelings of early adopters with new features and the joys and pains of using scheduling tools like Calendly. Personal stories highlight the humorous mishaps and technical challenges faced in troubleshooting. Transparency in tech, especially during outages, becomes a focal point, examining the ethics of communication with customers. They also share the significance of minor code changes, reflecting on the impacts these have on system performance, while reminiscing about past tech projects and the intricate dance of support and trust in customer relations.

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Intro

00:00 • 2min

Navigating Scheduling Tools and Technical Challenges

01:43 • 3min

Troubleshooting Tales: The Power Strip Incident

04:23 • 2min

The Art of Ego Searching and Engaging Online Discourse

06:38 • 3min

Word Games and Tech Nostalgia

09:21 • 12min

Navigating Technical Support Challenges

21:16 • 18min

The Power of a Single Byte in System Performance

39:10 • 2min

Transparency in Tech: A Critical Examination

40:54 • 21min

Navigating Data Challenges in Customer Support

01:01:30 • 19min

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: February 7th, 2022

I Know This! (Purpose-built systems with general-purpose guts)

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for February 7th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on February 7th included MattSci, Ian, Matt Ranney and Ken. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

Calendly tweet context
[@11:47](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=707) Hacker News post
[@18:15](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=1095) James Garfield shooting
[@21:29](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=1289) Adam’s story about customers taking on heroic interventions themselves, learning the value of logging all commands, and digging through email chains for paydirt
- Developed “three strikes” rule, focus on fixing the proximate issues (and defer general health boosters for another time) so as not to lose the faith of the customer
[@27:35](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=1655) E-cache parity error
[@33:38](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=2018) Support personnel remaining calm in the face of unknown damage
[@41:22](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=2482) Outages, postmortem, software as a service and public cloud providers
- Vendor transparency or lack thereof
[@48:28](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=2908) Ken: transparency as part of legal compliance?
MITRE CVE List of publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities
[@52:45](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=3165) Adventures in shady pay to play industry events
- Fixed raffles
[@1:01:30](https://youtu.be/WsvJT6i_atw?t=3690) “We never lost anyone’s data but it took some long vacations”
- Incident where someone corrupted kernel data structures
- Adam pulls a fast one
- Paul Newman and Robert Redford in (1973) The Sting movie
- Different ways to structure support contracts
- mdb -kw, the w is load bearing

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!