In 2021 Twitter rolled out Spaces. Listen to people you follow! Talk to followers! It sounded awful–the neologism “webinar” uncomfortably close. So when Bryan asked if I’d hang out with him to give it a shot, I set aside my skepticism–at the very least it would break up the mid-pandemic monotony!
And it was great! The next week illumos dropped support for SPARC so we had Tom Lyon join us (now frequent OxF contributor) and we jury rigged a recording system for a great discussion (… and eulogy: SPARC had been pretty important to us, early in our careers in particular). We wanted to share the recording in the lowest effort (cheapest) way possible so made a YouTube channel.
The (mostly) weekly show became a thing we do We were learning and having fun… and so were listeners. Social audio turned out to be a new (low-effort) way to share technical experience, wisdom, and stories. Bryan gave a great talk about it last year:
We only sporadically introduce guests and topics. We’ve evolved running jokes (“for the light-cone!“, “millennial podcaster audio quality”) with pretty narrow appeal. The Simpsons is referenced like bible verses. Arguably, we laugh at our own jokes too much? But bear with us, because the technical conversations are always pretty interesting.
Oxide and Friends is now a podcast–we just posted our 100th episode (Predictions 2024!). I imagine we’ll keep going as long as we’re having fun.