The Curious Engineer

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bcantrill.dtrace.org

Recent content on The Observation Deck

OS / kernelEngineering management / careersComputing historyEssays / personal

’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
180 from 14 Jun 2004 to 27 Sep 2026
Posting
monthly (9 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/index.xml

2026 7

  1. Fool's Expertise
  2. What Sun got wrong
  3. The contagion of fear
  4. The revolt of the reader
  5. A portentous reunion
  6. The peril of laziness lost
  7. The right place at the right time

2025 9

  1. Love your customers
  2. Your intellectual fly is open
  3. A parade in Oakland
  4. Systems Software in the Large
  5. Our $100M Series B
  6. The end game for John Fisher
  7. College Baseball, Venture Capital, and the Long Maybe
  8. RIP USENIX ATC
  9. Oxide’s compensation model: How is it going?

2024 7

  1. Why Gelsinger was wrong for Intel
  2. dtrace.conf(24)
  3. Blogging through the decades
  4. Remembering Charles Beeler
  5. Reflections on Founder Mode | The Observation Deck
  6. Engineering a culture | The Observation Deck
  7. Moore’s scofflaws | The Observation Deck

2023 3

  1. What punch cards teach us about AI risk | The Observation Deck
  2. Is it worse for John Fisher? | The Observation Deck
  3. The Cloud Computer | The Observation Deck

2022 2

  1. Homebrew social networking | The Observation Deck
  2. Twitter, when the wall came down | The Observation Deck

2021 3

  1. Hubris and Humility | The Observation Deck
  2. Twitter Spaces, a few weeks in | The Observation Deck
  3. Compensation as a reflection of values | The Observation Deck

2020 3

  1. Rust after the honeymoon | The Observation Deck
  2. The singular urgency of Ava DuVernay’s 13th | The Observation Deck
  3. RIP Khaled Bichara, 1971-2020 | The Observation Deck

2019 3

  1. The soul of a new computer company | The Observation Deck
  2. Ex-Joyeur | The Observation Deck
  3. Reflecting on The Soul of a New Machine | The Observation Deck

2018 7

  1. A EULA in FOSS clothing? | The Observation Deck
  2. Open source confronts its midlife crisis | The Observation Deck
  3. Assessing software engineering candidates | The Observation Deck
  4. Should KubeCon be double-blind? | The Observation Deck
  5. The relative performance of C and Rust | The Observation Deck
  6. Falling in love with Rust | The Observation Deck
  7. Talks I have given, conversations I have had | The Observation Deck

2017 1

  1. The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris | The Observation Deck

2016 8

  1. Reflections on Systems We Love | The Observation Deck
  2. Submitting to Systems We Love | The Observation Deck
  3. Systems We Love | The Observation Deck
  4. Hacked by a bug? | The Observation Deck
  5. dtrace.conf(16) wrap-up | The Observation Deck
  6. Joyent and Samsung: Thoughts after the close | The Observation Deck
  7. Samsung acquires Joyent: A CTO’s perspective | The Observation Deck
  8. Unikernels are unfit for production | The Observation Deck

2015 8

  1. Bringing clarity to containers | The Observation Deck
  2. Requests for discussion | The Observation Deck
  3. Software: Immaculate, fetid and grimy | The Observation Deck
  4. The foundation of cloud-native computing | The Observation Deck
  5. Triton: Docker and the “best of all worlds” | The Observation Deck
  6. SmartDataCenter and the merits of being opinionated | The Observation Deck
  7. Predicteria 2015 | The Observation Deck
  8. 2014 in review: Docker rising | The Observation Deck

2014 3

  1. SmartDataCenter and Manta are now open source | The Observation Deck
  2. Broadening node.js contributions | The Observation Deck
  3. From VP of Engineering to CTO | The Observation Deck

2013 5

  1. The Power of a Pronoun | The Observation Deck
  2. agghist, aggzoom and aggpack | The Observation Deck
  3. Happy 10th Birthday, DTrace! | The Observation Deck
  4. Serving up disaster porn with Manta | The Observation Deck
  5. Manta: From revelation to product | The Observation Deck

2012 4

  1. A systems software double-header: Surge and GOTO | The Observation Deck
  2. Post-revolutionary open source | The Observation Deck
  3. DTrace in the zone | The Observation Deck
  4. Debugging node.js memory leaks | The Observation Deck

2011 5

  1. Standing up SmartDataCenter | The Observation Deck
  2. KVM on illumos | The Observation Deck
  3. In defense of intrapreneurialism | The Observation Deck
  4. When magic collides | The Observation Deck
  5. Log/linear quantizations in DTrace | The Observation Deck

2010 9

  1. The DIRT on JSConf.eu and Surge | The Observation Deck
  2. A physician’s son | The Observation Deck
  3. DTrace, node.js and the Robinson Projection | The Observation Deck
  4. The liberation of OpenSolaris | The Observation Deck
  5. The node.js demographic | The Observation Deck
  6. OpenSolaris and the power to fork | The Observation Deck
  7. Hello Joyent! | The Observation Deck
  8. Good-bye, Sun | The Observation Deck
  9. Turning the corner | The Observation Deck

2009 5

  1. John Birrell | The Observation Deck
  2. Queue, CACM, and the rebirth of the ACM | The Observation Deck
  3. Moore’s Outlaws | The Observation Deck
  4. Eulogy for a benchmark | The Observation Deck
  5. The Hunter becomes the Hunted | The Observation Deck

2008 10

  1. Catching disk latency in the act | The Observation Deck
  2. On Modalities and Misadventures | The Observation Deck
  3. Fishworks: Now it can be told | The Observation Deck
  4. Concurrency’s Shysters | The Observation Deck
  5. Happy 5th Birthday, DTrace! | The Observation Deck
  6. DTrace and the Palisades Interstate Parkway | The Observation Deck
  7. Revisiting the Intel 432 | The Observation Deck
  8. DTrace on Linux | The Observation Deck
  9. A Tribute to Jim Gray | The Observation Deck
  10. dtrace.conf(08) | The Observation Deck

2007 15

  1. Announcing dtrace.conf | The Observation Deck
  2. Boom/bust cycles | The Observation Deck
  3. On Dreaming in Code | The Observation Deck
  4. DTrace on QNX! | The Observation Deck
  5. DTrace, Leopard, and the business of open source | The Observation Deck
  6. DTrace on ONTAP? | The Observation Deck
  7. DTrace at Google | The Observation Deck
  8. Caught on camera | The Observation Deck
  9. On the beauty in Beautiful Code | The Observation Deck
  10. Beautiful Code | The Observation Deck
  11. DTrace on the Scoble Show | The Observation Deck
  12. Alexander Morgan Gaffikin Cantrill | The Observation Deck
  13. DTrace at Joyent | The Observation Deck
  14. The inculcation of systems thinking | The Observation Deck
  15. Ian Murdock joins Sun! | The Observation Deck

2006 5

  1. DTrace on Rails, reprise | The Observation Deck
  2. DTrace on AIX? | The Observation Deck
  3. DTrace on Mac OS X! | The Observation Deck
  4. DTrace on FreeBSD, update | The Observation Deck
  5. DTrace on Rails | The Observation Deck

2005 28

  1. DTrace for Linux | The Observation Deck
  2. Welcome to ZFS! | The Observation Deck
  3. Your Debian fell into my OpenSolaris! | The Observation Deck
  4. Man, myth, legend | The Observation Deck
  5. TR35 | The Observation Deck
  6. DTrace and Ruby | The Observation Deck
  7. DTrace on FreeBSD? | The Observation Deck
  8. Ubuntu and DTrace break bread | The Observation Deck
  9. DTrace and PHP, demonstrated | The Observation Deck
  10. DTrace and PHP | The Observation Deck
  11. Party in our room | The Observation Deck
  12. DTrace at OSCON | The Observation Deck
  13. Using DTrace to debug NTP | The Observation Deck
  14. DTrace Safety | The Observation Deck
  15. Using DTrace to understand GNOME | The Observation Deck
  16. DTrace at JavaOne | The Observation Deck
  17. Still more blog sifting... | The Observation Deck
  18. Yet more blog sifting... | The Observation Deck
  19. More blog sifting | The Observation Deck
  20. DTrace and OpenSolaris at BayLISA | The Observation Deck
  21. Sifting through the blogs... | The Observation Deck
  22. OpenSolaris Sewer Tour | The Observation Deck
  23. DTrace and Python | The Observation Deck
  24. Your Java fell into my DTrace! | The Observation Deck
  25. On Reverse Engineering | The Observation Deck
  26. DTrace is not a security risk! | The Observation Deck
  27. DTrace Tips, Tricks and Gotchas | The Observation Deck
  28. Solaris 10 Revealed | The Observation Deck

2004 30

  1. The Economics of Software, redux | The Observation Deck
  2. Only 17 DTracing days left! | The Observation Deck
  3. From Russia, with love? | The Observation Deck
  4. UNIX, circa 1984 | The Observation Deck
  5. Jack on Solaris 10 | The Observation Deck
  6. Solaris 10 Launch | The Observation Deck
  7. DTrace update | The Observation Deck
  8. Tobin Cormac Gaffikin Cantrill | The Observation Deck
  9. The Economics of Software | The Observation Deck
  10. DTrace on LKML | The Observation Deck
  11. Demo’ing DTrace | The Observation Deck
  12. Demo Perils | The Observation Deck
  13. The DTrace integration | The Observation Deck
  14. DTrace vs. DProbes/LTT | The Observation Deck
  15. Whither systems research? | The Observation Deck
  16. Ron Popeil? | The Observation Deck
  17. Whither USENIX? (Part II) | The Observation Deck
  18. Whither USENIX? | The Observation Deck
  19. Beating the Odds | The Observation Deck
  20. BOF’d at USENIX | The Observation Deck
  21. The de commoditization of the os
  22. Whining pays off
  23. Be careful what you ask for...
  24. More dtrace blogging
  25. The early adopters
  26. Ill take a y pat...
  27. Open source again
  28. Open source p.s. dtrace zones zfs etc.
  29. Dtrace chat tomorrow
  30. Some prehistory