omicron VS play.core

> On my work I make 1-15 commits a day. If I have to spend thought cycles on the commit message, that is time that goes from other productive endeavours.

I make roughly that many commits a day as well. If something's easy to understand I'll put in a simple commit message (e.g. [1]), but I do put in the effort for more complicated ones.

[1] https://github.com/nextest-rs/nextest/commit/efd194b2e1d8d61...

[2] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron/commit/b07a8f593325...

> I also wonder if internally Linux is used for development of the platform itself

Developers at Oxide work on whatever platform they'd like. I will say I am in the minority as a Windows user though, most are on some form of Unix.

> so they can create "virtual" racks to dogfood the product without full blown physical racks.

So one of the reasons why Rust is such an advantage for us is its strong cross-platform support: you can run a simulated version of the control plane on Mac, Linux, and Illumos, without a physical rack. The non-simulated version must run on Helios. [1]

That said we do have a rack in the office (literally named dogfood) that employees can use for various things if they wish.

1: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron?tab=readme-ov-file#...

> I think the question is how well they can do the management plane.

Docs:

* https://docs.oxide.computer/api/guides/responses

See perhaps "This repo houses the work-in-progress Oxide Rack control plane."

* https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron

When we started the company, we knew it would be a three year build -- and indeed, our first product is in the final stages of development (i.e. EMC/safety certification). We have been very transparent about our progress along the way[0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7] -- and our software is essentially all open source, so you can follow along there as well.[8][9][10]

If you are asking "does anyone want a rack-scale computer?" the (short) answer is: yes, they do. The on-prem market has been woefully underserved -- and there are plenty of folks who are sick of Dell/HPE/VMware/Cisco, to say nothing of those who are public cloud borne and wondering if they should perhaps own some of their own compute rather than rent it all.

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/holistic-bo...

[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-oxide-s...

[2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/bringup-lab...

[3] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/more-tales-...

[4] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/another-lpc...

[5] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-pragmat...

[6] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/tales-from-...

[7] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-sidecar...

[8] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron

[9] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/propolis

[10] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris

Speaking of interesting names, their control plane is called Omicron: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron

An unrelated version on the ASCII playground (runs in the browser):

https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz/#/1640473937099

All the fun experiments on https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz/ remind me of Yugo Nakamura's now-defunct site http://yugop.com/ from back in the early 2000s.

They are very fun to make as well! I've built my own mini-lib on top of this ASCII rendering library (https://github.com/ertdfgcvb/play.core).

I design them in Monodraw, pass it through a janky converter I wrote that converts text into a json grid of characters. I then render a number of layers that get combined, which is a mix of the static art layer, and others generated from functions that spit out a similar cell based frame.

If you're interested: