Splitting light Season 1 Episode 37 Upstream complexity If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe A big part of the work that goes into building hardware is the supply chain. It’s hard to fathom how complex and time sensitive it is without having worked on it. When we built a device, there could be several hundred components. Each of these had to be ordered, shipped and soldered on. Some components were only available in some countries because that’s where the...
14 days ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 36 SerDes eye If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe My next assignment was making the 100 gigabit links of the router work. It broke my confidence and it eventually made me think I did not have the competence to work on hardware. Looking back, the issue was that even after all these successes, I still thought I was an imposter. This had caught back with me. To understand why this happened, I have to take many steps back. I had...
21 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 35 Mending loose ends If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe I was nearing the mark of my third decade of being alive. Many things were getting better. I liked my work. I liked the team and the projects. I was nearing the last payments of my student loans. Since my graduation, six years before, my expenses had almost been split into three items. Rent, student loan and income taxes. Nearly a third of my income each. Even though I...
28 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 34 Importance of upstreaming If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Once the second generation network device was working, the work to backport the new code library back to every other device began. That meant updating the codebase everywhere. This wasn’t too hard as the code was unified, only the configuration changed dynamically by looking at hardware flags or through communication with it using built-in protocols. Gen2 router...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 33 First power up to network up If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe At that point we had three generations of compute, one generation of storage and one generation of network. The third generation compute, on my side, wasn’t much work. The screen code was quickly finalized and small bits of code were written to make the communication. The rest was mostly adding special case code paths and adding configuration to make the...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 32 Excel sheets to configure If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Assignment of fixed amount of TCAM memory to subsystems One of the specificities I thought the lab lab’s team had was that we didn’t try to be too smart. We used simple battle tested tools and common systems. The complexity was not in the tools we used but in hiding the complexity in the final output as much as we could. We used excel for multiple things. We used...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 31 Piercing the abstraction layers If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe We build abstraction layers in software. We build them to hide the underlying complexity or limits. Operating systems are done to hide the complexity of interfacing with different devices. A SaaS hides the complexity of running and enhancing the software in exchange for a fee. From that you can derive multiple other advantages. On one side, the layers make...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 30 Oscillating P/N If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe This episode talks about mental health, if this is a sensitive subject for you, feel free to skip. Previously, I shared that with the help of doctors, stable work and income as well as family and friends, I was able to function almost properly. I felt that stability had to be extracted by raw will power. But if you zoomed in and looked with a high enough resolution you...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 29 Hardware documentation If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe We gave a lot of documentation to the cloud team or the dedicated team for each new hardware. This documentation was to help them implement support for the hardware, adapt their information system and operate it. Their day to day was managing the hardware and we tried to make it as simple as possible for them. There is a reason why computer engineering is layer upon...
2 months ago • 2 min read