Splitting light Season 1 Episode 27 From components to a display screen If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe We had used very simple LEDs to display the status of the nodes and management system for the first two compute generations. You could not do any actions except power down or reset the system with buttons. We eventually got feedback from the team who managed big quantities of these devices. It worked great but, sometimes, it was hard to handle in the...
11 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 26v Racks and racks of devices If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe An interesting thing that I became actually aware of at the time was the law of large numbers. I knew it existed, but witnessing the effects was new. As we produced thousands of devices, we would sometimes have issues that were triggered by defects or tolerance margins. I called them ghost bugs. We tried as much as we could to catch as many bugs as we could...
18 days ago • 4 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 25 The teapots and the biscuits If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe If you had entered the hardware lab during those years, you would have seen six people crammed in a room too small for their desks and the electronic test benches. There was open hardware with wires dangling in every direction. You could glimpse disks, network connectors, fibers, PCBs with components, metal chassis fitted with electronic and SCADA equipment...
25 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 24 Looking back on carbon14's launch If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Four racks of C14 as they would be later in DC4, 40 petabyte for 3 200 watts Did you think that last episode was anticlimactic? You are right to think so. At the time of the launch, I was not thinking of it as a product launch. I was “just” doing my work. I was given a problem, I would find a solution. I could not understand that I was doing so much more...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 23 Carbon14 product launch If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Picture from the launch tweet The initial scope for the cold storage product contained the hardware, frontend, backend, user , billing and website. When I took over, my goal was to reduce as much as I could the amount of work that had to be done to have a functional product. Screenshot from the website (1) I was able to have the dedicated team patch their own...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 22 My very first storage product If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe As I was qualifying the storage hardware, one person from the cloud team was assigned to work on the product part. Just as I was about to hand it over , he decided that he wanted to spend more time with his family which lived halfway across the globe, so he resigned. As we were between cycles, the C2 manufacturing order had been sent and the C3 wasn’t...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 21 1+ meter track length If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe This next assignment was to become the premise of a career pivot even though I could not know it at the time. Greg has these interesting ideas that I can only fully appreciate now that I am much more experienced and more battle tested. He did the hardware designs in a modular way. There was a project to reuse the C1 node to package it as a raspberry pie but it...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 20 Unable to show up on time to work 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. Alarm clock Coming out of adolescence and throughout my adult life I have had troubles with my sleep. Specifically waking up in the morning. One of the things I had loved the most at Epitech, the university I had gone to, was that it was open 24/7. You...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 19 The world, and us If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe C2 server racks I remember some higher ups of major hardware distributors and manufacturers visiting our office in Paris. Arnaud always kept the pleasure of showing off the lab to them. The small cramped room with its server room behind it. The six engineers and loads of open hardware laying around. He told them this was the full team that worked on the hardware. They...
2 months ago • 3 min read