We’re back! Not with rework. This time we’re talking about impedance and review. Apparently I can get into a heated argument about a board before it even gets here. In part one, I wrote about using Codex to design my own hardware because I’m sick of Control4, Savant, and the rest of that shit. The u...

Fuck1 it, we’re doing consumer hardware for ourselves now and getting fucked by economies of scale, I guess. This all started with me buying some Olimex Bluetooth proxies for Home Assistant. Then I started looking at the components and wondering if I could get better range. Now I’m designing boards,...

DUM-E (“dummy”) and U (“you”) are the names of the robot arms in the Iron Man movies. After watching this movie for the n-teenth time, I have a strong urge to also have robotic arms in a workshop like Tony Stark. You can see the value of the robots clearly throughout the movie. The robots allow Tony...

Tesla had its first Battery Day on September 22nd, 20201. What a fantastic world we live in that we can witness the first Apple-like keynote for batteries. Batteries are a part of our everyday life; without them, the world would be a much different place. Your cellphone, flashlight, tablet, laptops,...

I previously wrote a bit about our internal infrastructure in my post on The Art of Automation. This post is going to go into details about our automated Chief infrastructure Officer (CIO). I joke so much that I automated our CIO that I even named the repo holding the code… cio. I took the time this...

I have wanted a 3D printer for a very long time. I hope you can tell from my ACM Queue column that I like to do a lot of research and I tend to want the best thing. I had been keeping my eyes on the 3D printer product space for quite some time. This article is going to go over the technical details ...

My mom has a tendency to buy these really terribly spec’d Windows machines. She’s been doing it for as long as I’ve been alive. I was surprised when on one of our latest Zoom calls she said “You know what, I’m beginning to think that size matters.” I’ve only been telling her this for years! Here’s t...

Being cooped up at home got me looking into the new Xbox and PlayStation 5. I was curious about the innovations in the consoles since their successors. Both claim to have ray tracing and support for 8K graphics. This then got me thinking about how prevalent 8K televisions are today. 8K televisions s...

I am unsure if my love of automation comes from a dislike of doing the same thing twice or an overall desire to be more productive and make everything more efficient. Like a lot of programmers, I often ask myself “can this be scripted” when I find myself doing a manual task. I was inspired recently ...

A byte of data has been stored in a number of different ways as newer, better, and faster mediums of storage are introduced. A byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly refers to eight bits. A bit is a unit of information that can be expressed as 0 or 1, representing logical state. In...

When you upload photos to Instagram, back up your phone to “the cloud”, send an email through GMail, or save a document in a storage application like Dropbox or Google Drive, your data is being saved in a data center. These data centers are airplane hangar-sized warehouses, packed to the brim with r...

I had a lot of fun writing blog posts in the past about my home lab and some of my personal infrastructure so I thought I would do the same as we built out our office. Much like moving into a new place, the first thing I always plan to have setup on move-in day is internet. We did the same with our ...

WE STARTED A COMPUTER COMPANY!! You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to say that! I guess some context would help… Steve Tuck, Bryan Cantrill, and I officially started the Oxide Computer Company. Since then, we’ve been working on closing up fundraising, getting an awesome office, and hiring! ...

Last week I attended the Open Source Firmware Conference. It was amazing! The talks, people, and overall feel of the conference really left me feeling inspired and lucky to attend. Having been pushed to attend vendor conferences and trade shows through my career for various jobs, it was so refreshin...

At lunch today I learned about Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) which is an implementation of transactional memory. The conversation started as a rant about why transactional memory is bad but then it evolved into how this concept even came to be and how it even got implemented if it’s...

Hello! I thought it would be fun to write a post aimed towards business leaders making technology decisions for their organizations. There is a lot of hype in our field and little truth behind the hype. Like most things I write about, this started from an idea I had on Twitter: has anyone ever done ...

Below is the foreward for the new book on Linux Observability with BPF by two of my favorite programmers, David Calavera and Lorenzo Fontana! I was pretty stoked about getting to write the foreward, I asked O’Reilly if I could publish it on my blog as well and they said yes. I hope you all check out...

“Can I get an encore, do you want more” - Jay-Z I recently read Ben Horowitz’s book, The Hard Thing about Hard Things. It’s really eye opening and creates a level of empathy in the reader for leaders that make hard decisions every day. It covers everything from how to know your company is toxic to h...

I gave a talk recently at GoTo Chicago on Why open source firmware is important and I thought it would be nice to also write a blog post with my findings. This post will focus on why open source firmware is important for security. Privilege Levels In your typical “stack” today you have the various l...

Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting with the Transposit team in San Francisco. Tech is a super small world and it turns out the two founders and I are separated by one-degree through several different people we know. In meeting them I closed many loops without even realizing it, but I digress… ...

I came up with a list of questions I would ask my cloud provider if I was buying a product. They are as follows: 1. What problem is this solving? I would ask this to make sure I even need this product. So many people tend to buy into the hype for “shiny”, they miss if they even needed the thing in t...

This post is co-authored by Kathy Simpson. “understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.” ― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking As leaders, setting up a ...

Last week I got to see what it was like to be an investigative journalist for a day. It was thrilling. I will get into what I learned but first I waned to give some background on why I was doing this. I have a general curiosity for people. It’s interesting to me to uncover what people are motivated ...

I’ve been talking to a lot of people in different layers of the stack during my funemployment. I wanted to share one of the problems I’ve been thinking about and maybe you can think of some clever solutions to solve it. Conway’s Law states “organizations which design systems … are constrained to pro...

I recently have started researching and playing around with RISC-V for fun. I thought it might be nice to combine some of what I’ve learned into a blog post. However, I don’t just want to highlight what I learned. I want to use this as an example of how to go about learning something new. Recently, ...

I learned a lot about myself and the way big companies are organized over the past year or so. I had mentioned a bit in a previous blog post and podcast about “the N + 1 shithead problem” (from Bryan Cantrill’s talk on leadership). To reiterate, the “N +1 shithead problem” occurs when you are demoti...

I have written a bit about how I am spending my time while being unemployed and I thought I would continue. There was one thing I had left out of my previous post on my visit to the Pentagon. THEY HAVE A REAL ENIGMA MACHINE THERE. Okay, moving on… QCon and University of Cambridge I gave a talk at QC...

I stated in my first post on my reflections of leadership in other industries that I would write a follow up post after having hung out in the world of finance for a day. This is pretty easy to do when you live in NYC. Originally for college, I was a finance major at NYU Stern School of Business bef...

I’ve had a bit of a crazy week. Tuesday, I got a tour of the Pentagon from a friend that is in the US Digital Service (USDS) for the Department of Defense (DoD), called the Defense Digital Service (DDS). Wednesday (the day of writing this), I shadowed a friend who is a surgical resident during their...

You can find my goodreads account at goodreads.com/jessfraz. Romanticized Tech I call this genre of books “romanticized tech” because of the way tech is portrayed in them in a very idealistic and whimsical way. It’s nice to pick up one of these if you are feeling very “Black Mirror” to remember why ...