Bryan Cantrill

Systems software engineer, co-creator of DTrace, CTO and co-founder of Oxide Computer Company. Blogs at bcantrill.dtrace.org. Known for strong opinions on software engineering culture, delivered in long-form essays and talks (notably "The Complexity of Simplicity," "Is It Time to Rewrite the Operating System in Rust?").

Before Oxide, Cantrill was at Sun Microsystems (where DTrace was created) and later Joyent (where he worked on SmartOS and Node.js infrastructure). At Oxide he's building rack-scale computers with firmware-to-software integration, all open source.

His writing tends toward a specific pattern: take a widely-held but vague belief about software engineering, trace it to a concrete historical source, then show how current trends violate or vindicate it. "The Peril of Laziness Lost" is a characteristic example — Larry Wall's laziness virtue as a lens on LLM-generated bloat.

Oxide publishes RFDs (Requests for Discussion) openly, including RFD 0576 on LLM use guidelines. The Oxide and Friends podcast covers systems engineering topics with recurring guests from the industry.

Ingested articles

• peril-of-laziness-lost — LLMs lack the virtue of laziness; human time constraints drive simplicity