- Experience: I have 17 years of professional experience
- I've worked in the public sector, private sector, startups, enterprises & Fortune 500s
- I've been CTO multiple times / am comfortable in the board room or C-suite
- I care about customers & product, I can help with sales, product road map, guiding a team, or as an individual contributor
- I have experience with the full stack: front-end, back-end, DevOps, system level programming & networking
- Teams are important to me. I want to see the team, and the company thrive. Often that means inglorious toil. I'm cool with that.
- I am comfortable matching any US time zone's business hours
What I am looking for:
A company that values understanding what they are shipping, where team members are individually responsible for their code.
I would prefer to continue working on system, network, or containerization work with Rust, but the previous sentence is my hard requirement.
----
AI is exciting, but the company I am working for is flying too close to the sun for me. This isn't a criticism of them (and they are removed from my resume, etc. so wont be publicly identifiable) but it isn't the kind of work I want to be doing.
If you are frustrated with Github being down again, and just want an alternative, the other options listed are better fits. If you have the time to look at doing more than that, then check out fossil https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
- It isn't git
- Works best with smaller teams
- You need to be ok self hosting (single binary, easy to do)
The first point is really the killer. It is revision control, it is as good as git (maybe better), but it is different. Git = branches are easy, was built to support Linux's lieutenant development model, and a massive, loosely connected team. Fossil = branches are intentionally hard, built to support a small, tight knit team (SQLite).
Most teams I've been on are closer in size to SQLite than they are to Linux, but everyone already knows git at a gut deep level. YMMV.
I've sorta overlooked Fossil a lot (mostly because it's not git...), but just browsing some instances on chisel and the fossil homepage has me intrigued.
If you'll entertain me for a moment...
My dream "forge" would just be nice-looking frontend for displaying repos on the web, a public issue tracker (with per-issue permissions), a public way to submit issues, and essentially a single canonical root for repositories that users on the team work on. I don't want individual user repos or pages, organizations, or any social stuff. I definitely don't want open registration.
It really looks like fossil is actually what I've always wanted.
How limiting is the custom theme support? It looks like you can just straight up write your own HTML/CSS for everything. If I really want a custom design, will I be disappointed in the long run?
Also, it looks like it follows that user model I want, where it's "repositories with users" instead of "users with repositories". Is that correct?
And here I was trying to hype myself up to write my own git web frontend.
I can entertain you since no one else has so far. I've been using Fossil since 2009.
> My dream "forge" would just be nice-looking frontend for displaying repos on the web, a public issue tracker (with per-issue permissions), a public way to submit issues, and essentially a single canonical root for repositories that users on the team work on.
Fossil will get you the frontend (for some value of nice-looking) for displaying repositories on the Web. It will also get you the issue tracker, which can optionally be public[0].
For products you're developing that involve multiple repositories, it's possible to use a "meta repository"[1] to establish what's called a login group in a way that's vaguely reminiscent of using, say, Kerberos as an adjunct to /etc/passwd. You still have to ensure that the users exist in the user information table on the joined repositories[2], but the password information will at least be synchronized.
> I don't want individual user repos or pages, organizations, or any social stuff. I definitely don't want open registration.
There's some social stuff if you find later that you want it. Fossil development moved from a more traditional mailing list to a self-hosted forum a while ago, but it isn't enabled by default.
You can use tech notes as a sort of micro-logging facility in the same vein as snippets if you're familiar with how Silicon Valley companies sometimes have cultures of personal status updates. I'll admit that I've gotten a fair amount of use out of this.
I'm honestly not sure if open registration is possible. I've never had an excuse to try it.
> How limiting is the custom theme support? It looks like you can just straight up write your own HTML/CSS for everything. If I really want a custom design, will I be disappointed in the long run?
If you stick just to HTML and CSS, you should be fine. The functionality is pretty spartan.
> Also, it looks like it follows that user model I want, where it's "repositories with users" instead of "users with repositories". Is that correct?
Yep. The repository itself is what has the user information.
> For products you're developing that involve multiple repositories, it's possible to use a "meta repository"[1] to establish what's called a login group
Gotcha; that makes sense considering how users are handled.
> There's some social stuff if you find later that you want it. Fossil development moved from a more traditional mailing list to a self-hosted forum a while ago, but it isn't enabled by default.
That all sounds reasonable (this + the tech notes you mention next). I generalized a bit too wide when I said "social stuff". I was thinking more along the social media angle (GitHub stars, follows, etc.); but with the way it sounds, that wouldn't make sense given the user model anyway!
I currently run a Forgejo instance for a small team, and I can disable some of those features, but it just feels a bit messy with so many UI elements that don't have a purpose.
> If you stick just to HTML and CSS, you should be fine. The functionality is pretty spartan.
I think I'll have to try it out to see what is possible on this front!
> This is governed by the capabilities assigned to a user. [...]
Between this and login groups, it actually looks quite reasonable to manage a set of repositories in the way I'd like! I really dig everything being so tightly coupled to a given project, actually. Makes me a bit bummed I never gave Fossil a look all these years.
> 2: Funnily enough, it shares the same pain as administering Plan 9's fossil(4) fileserver.
Reading that over, I can see how that requires some due diligence. I already foresee the inevitable "why weren't the changes propagated to the other repositories?" moment.
> I generalized a bit too wide when I said "social stuff". I was thinking more along the social media angle (GitHub stars, follows, etc.)
I figured given the context, but I wanted to cover this base too just in the off chance that the intention was different. I overcorrected a little perhaps. (:
> I already foresee the inevitable "why weren't the changes propagated to the other repositories?" moment.
It's something of an ironic "What manages the configuration of the software configuration management system?" moment, really. My suggestion is to have a sensible chuckle at it.
Fossil looks really cool. I like how it's all in one and includes the web interface. The only thing is it doesn't seem like anyone actually uses it outside of sqlite. I don't necessarily need to use the most popular thing out there, but some social proof is nice.
If you follow Oxide (perhaps just by reading their Blog[1] and RFDs[2]), I think you'd find a more rigorous engineering and business culture than most case studies you're referring to from the 90s/00s. Of course it's not impossible that Oxide is getting themselves in trouble, but there is more evidence supporting a successful case, in my opinion.
The problems are 1) money is flowing so freely that you can't use the raise here as a signal of anything meaningful and 2) the industry (especially hardware) is in massive flux right now.
So what might look like success in this environment might look very different if the bubble pops.
Obviously Oxide has a ton of experience on its side but it's so opaque where any of this goes that even they can't read the tea leaves.
I mean, really no one is fully independent — we are all dependent on each other for the necessities of life. But in this context "independent" means "not a subsidiary of another company".
It’s success compared to the other possibility: not raising money and going out of business. We still cheer when a rocket separates from the first stage and ignites the next. Things going as planned during a risky and challenging endeavor is still a good thing.
And it is not success compared to another possibility, earning enough money to not need further fundraising.
Of course some businesses are more capital intensive and have longer time-to-money timelines due to factors outside the control of the company, and in that case fundraising is an essential tool for a long time.
Yeah they're doing a hardware play, which means it's really capital intensive. That kind of cash means they can afford to do a larger production run, which gets them better economies of scale, which means more profit per unit sold. investors are being given private access to see that the demand is there to justify further investment.
Being the "Apple" of enterprise compute (ie. vertical hardware software integration), solving the layers of aggregrate cruft that every single player in the Linux space (including Facebook/Google and other hyperscalers to some degree) have to deal with for compatibility since no one company has enough leverage to clean up poor or outdated legacy decisions in the stack. This is just a bigger market than anything EdTech, and with a real moat. Plus bonafides and actual evidence they are pulling it off, but that's honestly all gravy on top of the market opportunity.
Why not the vertical integration of Oracle Solaris servers, IBM vertical integration of IBM i, z/OS or z/TPF, Unisys vertical integration of Clearpath MCP or OS 2200?
The basis of my comparison was nothing to do with business circumstance, but just that Apple and Oxide both were known for having taste in software (in Apple's case faded but still apparent in the DNA), and they build their own hardware to express that taste.
I think perhaps Solaris had a bit of that under Sun but I can't imagine that being the case under Oracle. And I'm not really an enterprise infra guy so can't really speak to IBM or Unisys offerings.
I do feel like Oxide are qualitatively different from the others pjlmp mentioned because they're staying commodity in key interfaces like CPU ISA / OS / ecosystem (thing with big network effects) and mainly focused on fixing the control plane / management / architecture mess.
The others suffered "ecosystem collapse". With Oxide you won't be stuck on a "burning platform", your main risk is that the value prop for the hardware & management experience doesn't play out.
Right -- customers don't have to port their stuff to a new platform or arch or anything. It's just normal x86_64 Linux/Windows VMs, or Terraform if they're so inclined.
IBM stuff is likely to expensive and optimized for different things. Same for the other Post-Mainframe stuff. You would pay for a lot of stuff you don't need, and there is a reason very few new costumers adopt it.
Oxide costumers want to run standard VM that they normally run in public cloud.
Do Oracle Solaris serves come with a horizontal scale out cloud infrastructure? As far as I know they don't.
Product-market fit. Based on prior Oxide announcements, they've been clear the raising is in large part about building out manufacturing to meet customer demand. In venture capital investing, once you've found a winner (a company that you have high confidence will be successful and will produce returns at some multiple above your investment), you ought to put much more money into that winner to maximize that return.
In the last round Bryan and Steve talked about being over-subscribed, especially from existing investors in prior rounds. That likely means those investors see exactly what I've described: a winner that's worthy of additional funding to pump their total return on investment.
shill. or fan, prolly.
i don't use the more current word fanboy. ugh.
(when older words are good enough, why invent a new word. but I see that as a trend. each new generation wants to distinguish themselves from the past one. So they invent new words as one way of doing that. and some of them get adopted into general circulation or use.)
Unless the two words, fan and fanboy, mean the different things, which i'm not interested in checking out anyway.
I am building a cloud hosting company that exposes the cloud as a single docker host. No VMs to manage, just containers and easy controls to set the number of CPUs, RAM, disk that you want your containers to have access to.
Joyent did something like this ~11 years go, and I loved using it, but then they where acquired by Samsung and shut down their public (non-enterprise) offering.
This is try 3 at building something as good, and it is working!
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Rust, Linux Networking, Hypervisors, Containerization, Docker, Wireguard, SQL, AWS etc (more upon request)
Résumé/CV: https://jordanschatz.com/resume.html (intentionally out of date, see below)
Email: jordan@noionlabs.com
Why I may be what you want:
- Experience: I have 17 years of professional experience
- I've worked in the public sector, private sector, startups, enterprises & Fortune 500s
- I've been CTO multiple times / am comfortable in the board room or C-suite
- I care about customers & product, I can help with sales, product road map, guiding a team, or as an individual contributor
- I have experience with the full stack: front-end, back-end, DevOps, system level programming & networking
- Teams are important to me. I want to see the team, and the company thrive. Often that means inglorious toil. I'm cool with that.
- I am comfortable matching any US time zone's business hours
What I am looking for:
A company that values understanding what they are shipping, where team members are individually responsible for their code.
I would prefer to continue working on system, network, or containerization work with Rust, but the previous sentence is my hard requirement.
----
AI is exciting, but the company I am working for is flying too close to the sun for me. This isn't a criticism of them (and they are removed from my resume, etc. so wont be publicly identifiable) but it isn't the kind of work I want to be doing.