Highest Rated Comments


bcantrill24 karma

No. What Oracle does is Wrong (capital "W") in that they have no regard for the importance of a social contract; no company ever outgrows its responsibilities to society.

bcantrill23 karma

Someone asked:

What's the most beautiful piece of code you've seen over the years. (Code you wrote your self excluded)

Unfortunately they forgot a question mark, so the comment was nuked, but here's my reply:

Oh, exciting question -- and one that I reserve the right to answer more than once! ;) One piece of code that I absolutely love is this little bit of auto-scaling in the kernel memory allocator. It's very tight and elegant -- a really clever technique that I haven't seen used nearly enough. This is written by Jeff Bonwick, who later went on to (along with Matt Ahrens) invent ZFS. Jeff was my mentor at Sun, and a personal inspiration -- and I think that that little snippet of code embodies Bonwick.

bcantrill15 karma

I think I would rather fight one horse-sized Sun Microsystems than one duck-sized Oracle -- let alone a hundred. Never underestimate the depravity of a sociopathic duck!

bcantrill14 karma

One of the concerns that I have is that stacks are becoming ever-more complicated (accelerated by open source, which has allowed us to live the dream -- and the nightmare -- of componentization) but that our education isn't keeping pace. So permit me to be the anti-Peter Thiel: budding software engineers need to complete their formal education, first and foremost. I know that this isn't necessarily a popular opinion, but formal computer science education is essential, and I have seen (and continue to see) a marked difference between those who have completed it and those who haven't. An essential part of that formal education: learning what you don't know. If you don't come out of a formal education humbled by it all (and astonished that a software system can so much as boot, let alone run, let alone run well), then you missed the point.

bcantrill14 karma

Bonwick had an enormous influence on me in that he got me to change my expectations of myself: prior to working at Sun, I viewed defects as inevitable and that software was like much else that we engineered (namely, fated to be plagued by unknowable and transient errors). But in working with Jeff -- who came to software from math, not from engineering -- I came to appreciate that the better analogue for software is a mathematical proof, and that the beauty in software is that we fashion a proof that functions as a machine. As a result, we (and and we in software alone) can create machines that are perfect. This was tremendously inspiring to me, and has had a profound effect on my career and in the pleasure I take in the work.

In terms of accomplishing the same at Joyent, I certainly aspire to inspire software engineers in the same way. I think sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fail -- but I think the successes have outnumbered the failures, and I continue to be inspired by the team that we have built here.