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Ramblings from Jessie Publications Out-of-this-World Additive Manufacturing ACM Queue: October 2020 [ PDF ] From thingamabobs to rockets, 3D printing takes many forms. The Life of a Data Byte ACM Queue: August 2020 [ PDF ] Be kind and rewind. Power to the People ACM Queue: May 2020 [ PDF ] Communications of the ACM: August 2020 Reducing datacenter carbon footprints. Chipping away at Moore’s law ACM Queue: March 2020 [ PDF ] Communications of the ACM: June 2020 Most modern CPUs are just chiplets connected together. Securing the Boot Process ACM Queue: February 2020 [ PDF ] Communications of the ACM: March 2020 The hardware root of trust. Opening up the Baseboard Management Controller ACM Queue: January 2020 [ PDF ] Communications of the ACM: February 2020 If the CPU is the brain of the board, the BMC is the brain stem. Open-Source Firmware ACM Queue: July 2019 [ PDF ] Communications of the ACM: October 2019 Step into the world behind the kernel. Security for the Modern Age ACM Queue: December 2018 [ PDF ] Communications of the ACM: January 2019 Securely running processes that require the entire syscall interface. Blog Featured Books I Recommend 6 min read Some of my favorite books. Talks 5 min read A list of technical talks I have given. Battery Day Tuesday, September 29, 2020 · 23 min read 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, drones, cars, and other devices would not be portable and operational without batteries. At the heart of it, batteries store chemical energy and convert it into electrical energy. The Automated CIO Tuesday, September 8, 2020 · 4 min read 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 weekend to finally clean up some of this code. Previously, our infrastructure was held together with bash, popsicle sticks, glue, and some rust. A Tale of Two 3D Printers (and all additive manufacturing processes) Saturday, June 13, 2020 · 21 min read 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 behind 3D printing as well as my experience with two different products. Size Matters Monday, May 25, 2020 · 4 min read 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 the problem. There are a bunch of shitty Windows machines you can buy that cost around $400 dollars and have something like 4GB RAM. Where is the high bandwidth internet for the masses? Sunday, May 3, 2020 · 6 min read 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 seem to be in the same state as 4K televisions a few years ago. One thing I know through my life is that pixel density will continue to get bigger and bigger. The Art of Automation Saturday, April 18, 2020 · 8 min read 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 by reading Wolfram’s writing on his personal infrastructure for productivity1. I, too, have written about my personal infrastructure2, but not at the level of depth or with the same focus on productivity as Wolfram. The Life of a Data Byte Sunday, March 8, 2020 · 29 min read 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 the case of paper cards, a bit was stored as the presence or absence of a hole in the card at a specific place. Power to the People Wednesday, February 26, 2020 · 18 min read 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 racks of servers and cooling mechanisms. Depending on the application you are using you are likely hitting one of Facebook’s, Google’s, Amazon’s, or Microsoft’s data centers. Network booted, home initialized Friday, January 17, 2020 · 3 min read 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 office as well. Before we even had any real furniture, we made sure that we had a network connection. Born in a Garage Monday, December 2, 2019 · 4 min read 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! You are probably thinking “a computer company? that’s outrageous!”.. well it is and it isn’t. Over the last year, I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time talking with folks who are currently running workloads on premises. Tales from Firmware Camp Tuesday, September 10, 2019 · 7 min read 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 refreshing to have the chance to hang out with folks from such a genuine community that really just want to help one another. Transactional Memory and Tech Hype Waves Wednesday, August 14, 2019 · 5 min read 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 such a terrible idea. What is transactional memory? First let’s start by going over what transactional memory is. You might be familiar with a deadlock. The Business Executive's Guide to Kubernetes Tuesday, July 23, 2019 · 7 min read 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 technical breakdowns of these products in Gartner reports that are actually just trash, is this something you'd read. Linux Observability with BPF Wednesday, Jul...