More from Oxide Computer Company Blog
How it started Four years ago, we were struggling to hire. Our team was small (~23 employees), and we knew that we needed many more people to execute on our audacious vision. While we had had success hiring in our personal networks, those networks now felt tapped; we needed to get further afield. As is our wont, we got together as a team and brainstormed: how could we get a bigger and broader applicant pool? One of our engineers, Sean, shared some personal experience: that Oxide’s principles and values were very personally important to him — but that when he explained them to people unfamiliar with the company, they were (understandably?) dismissed as corporate claptrap. Sean had found, however, that there was one surefire way to cut through the skepticism: to explain our approach to compensation. Maybe, Sean wondered, we should talk about it publicly? "I could certainly write a blog entry explaining it," I offered. At this suggestion, the team practically lunged with enthusiasm: the reaction was so uniformly positive that I have to assume that everyone was sick of explaining this most idiosyncratic aspect of Oxide to friends and family. So what was the big deal about our compensation? Well, as a I wrote in the resulting piece, Compensation as a Reflection of Values, our compensation is not merely transparent, but uniform. The piece — unsurprisingly, given the evergreen hot topic that is compensation — got a ton of attention. While some of that attention was negative (despite the piece trying to frontrun every HN hater!), much of it was positive — and everyone seemed to be at least intrigued. And in terms of its initial purpose, the piece succeeded beyond our wildest imagination: it brought a surge of new folks interested in the company. Best of all, the people new to Oxide were interested for all of the right reasons: not the compensation per se, but for the values that the compensation represents. The deeper they dug, the more they found to like — and many who learned about Oxide for the first time through that blog entry we now count as long-time, cherished colleagues. That blog entry was a long time ago now, and today we have ~75 employees (and a shipping product!); how is our compensation model working out for us? How it’s going Before we get into our deeper findings, two updates that are so important that we have updated the blog entry itself. First, the dollar figure itself continues to increase over time (as of this writing in 2025, $207,264); things definitely haven’t gotten (and aren’t getting!) any cheaper. And second, we did introduce variable compensation for some sales roles. Yes, those roles can make more than the rest of us — but they can also make less, too. And, importantly: if/when those folks are making more than the rest of us, it’s because they’re selling a lot — a result that can be celebrated by everyone! Those critical updates out of the way, how is it working? There have been a lot of surprises along the way, mostly (all?) of the positive variety. A couple of things that we have learned: People take their own performance really seriously. When some outsiders hear about our compensation model, they insist that it can’t possibly work because "everyone will slack off." I have come to find this concern to be more revealing of the person making the objection than of our model, as our experience has been in fact the opposite: in my one-on-one conversations with team members, a frequent subject of conversation is people who are concerned that they aren’t doing enough (or that they aren’t doing the right thing, or that their work is progressing slower than they would like). I find my job is often to help quiet this inner critic while at the same time stoking what I feel is a healthy urge: when one holds one’s colleagues in high regard, there is an especially strong desire to help contribute — to prove oneself worthy of a superlative team. Our model allows people to focus on their own contribution (whatever it might be). People take hiring really seriously. When evaluating a peer (rather than a subordinate), one naturally has high expectations — and because (in the sense of our wages, anyway) everyone at Oxide is a peer, it shouldn’t be surprising that folks have very high expectations for potential future colleagues. And because the Oxide hiring process is writing intensive, it allows for candidates to be thoroughly reviewed by Oxide employees — who are tough graders! It is, bluntly, really hard to get a job at Oxide. It allows us to internalize the importance of different roles. One of the more incredible (and disturbingly frequent) objections I have heard is: "But is that what you’ll pay support folks?" I continue to find this question offensive, but I no longer find it surprising: the specific dismissal of support roles reveals a widespread and corrosive devaluation of those closest to customers. My rejoinder is simple: think of the best support engineers you’ve worked with; what were they worth? Anyone who has shipped complex systems knows these extraordinary people — calm under fire, deeply technical, brilliantly resourceful, profoundly empathetic — are invaluable to the business. So what if you built a team entirely of folks like that? The response has usually been: well, sure, if you’re going to only hire those folks. Yeah, we are — and we have! It allows for fearless versatility. A bit of a corollary to the above, but subtly different: even though we (certainly!) hire and select for certain roles, our uniform compensation means we can in fact think primarily in terms of people unconfined by those roles. That is, we can be very fluid about what we’re working on, without fear of how it will affect a perceived career trajectory. As a concrete example: we had a large customer that wanted to put in place a program for some of the additional work they wanted to see in the product. The complexity of their needs required dedicated program management resources that we couldn’t spare, and in another more static company we would have perhaps looked to hire. But in our case, two folks came together — CJ from operations, and Izzy from support — and did something together that was in some regards new to both of them (and was neither of their putative full-time jobs!) The result was indisputably successful: the customer loved the results, and two terrific people got a chance to work closely together without worrying about who was dotted-lined to whom. It has allowed us to organizationally scale. Many organizations describe themselves as flat, and a reasonable rebuttal to this are the "shadow hierarchies" created by the tyranny of structurelessness. And indeed, if one were to read (say) Valve’s (in)famous handbook, the autonomy seems great — but the stack ranking decidedly less so, especially because the handbook is conspicuously silent on the subject of compensation. (Unsurprisingly, compensation was weaponized at Valve, which descended into toxic cliquishness.) While we believe that autonomy is important to do one’s best work, we also have a clear structure at Oxide in that Steve Tuck (Oxide co-founder and CEO) is in charge. He has to be: he is held accountable to our investors — and he must have the latitude to make decisions. Under Steve, it is true that we don’t have layers of middle management. Might we need some in the future? Perhaps, but what fraction of middle management in a company is dedicated to — at some level — determining who gets what in terms of compensation? What happens when you eliminate that burden completely? It frees us to both lead and follow. We expect that every Oxide employee has the capacity to lead others — and we tap this capacity frequently. Of course, a company in which everyone is trying to direct all traffic all the time would be a madhouse, so we also very much rely on following one another too! Just as our compensation model allows us to internalize the values of different roles, it allows us to appreciate the value of both leading and following, and empowers us each with the judgement to know when to do which. This isn’t always easy or free of ambiguity, but this particular dimension of our versatility has been essential — and our compensation model serves to encourage it. It causes us to hire carefully and deliberately. Of course, one should always hire carefully and deliberately, but this often isn’t the case — and many a startup has been ruined by reckless expansion of headcount. One of the roots of this can be found in a dirty open secret of Silicon Valley middle management: its ranks are taught to grade their career by the number of reports in their organization. Just as if you were to compensate software engineers based on the number of lines of code they wrote, this results in perverse incentives and predictable disasters — and any Silicon Valley vet will have plenty of horror stories of middle management jockeying for reqs or reorgs when they should have been focusing on product and customers. When you can eliminate middle management, you eliminate this incentive. We grow the team not because of someone’s animal urges to have the largest possible organization, but rather because we are at a point where adding people will allow us to better serve our market and customers. It liberates feedback from compensation. Feedback is, of course, very important: we all want to know when and where we’re doing the right thing! And of course, we want to know too where there is opportunity for improvement. However, Silicon Valley has historically tied feedback so tightly to compensation that it has ceased to even pretend to be constructive: if it needs to be said, performance review processes aren’t, in fact, about improving the performance of the team, but rather quantifying and stack-ranking that performance for purposes of compensation. When compensation is moved aside, there is a kind of liberation for feedback itself: because feedback is now entirely earnest, it can be expressed and received thoughtfully. It allows people to focus on doing the right thing. In a world of traditional, compensation-tied performance review, the organizational priority is around those things that affect compensation — even at the expense of activity that clearly benefits the company. This leads to all sorts of wild phenomena, and most technology workers will be able to tell stories of doing things that were clearly right for the company, but having to hide it from management that thought only narrowly in terms of their own stated KPIs and MBOs. By contrast, over and over (and over!) again, we have found that people do the right thing at Oxide — even if (especially if?) no one is looking. The beneficiary of that right thing? More often than not, it’s our customers, who have uniformly praised the team for going above and beyond. It allows us to focus on the work that matters. Relatedly, when compensation is non-uniform, the process to figure out (and maintain) that non-uniformity is laborious. All of that work — of line workers assembling packets explaining themselves, of managers arming themselves with those packets to fight in the arena of organizational combat, and then of those same packets ultimately being regurgitated back onto something called a review — is work. Assuming such a process is executed perfectly (something which I suppose is possible in the abstract, even though I personally have never seen it), this is work that does not in fact advance the mission of the company. Not having variable compensation gives us all of that time and energy back to do the actual work — the stuff that matters. It has stoked an extraordinary sense of teamwork. For me personally — and as I relayed on an episode of Software Misadventures — the highlights of my career have been being a part of an extraordinary team. The currency of a team is mutual trust, and while uniform compensation certainly isn’t the only way to achieve that trust, boy does it ever help! As Steve and I have told one another more times that we can count: we are so lucky to work on this team, with its extraordinary depth and breadth. While our findings have been very positive, I would still reiterate what we said four years ago: we don’t know what the future holds, and it’s easier to make an unwavering commitment to the transparency rather than the uniformity. That said, the uniformity has had so many positive ramifications that the model feels more important than ever. We are beyond the point of this being a curiosity; it’s been essential for building a mission-focused team taking on a problem larger than ourselves. So it’s not a fit for everyone — but if you are seeking an extraordinary team solving hard problems in service to customers, consider Oxide!
Sometime in late 2007, we had the idea of a DTrace conference. Or really, more of a meetup; from the primordial e-mail I sent: The goal here, by the way, is not a DTrace user group, but more of a face-to-face meeting with people actively involved in DTrace — either by porting it to another system, by integrating probes into higher level environments, by building higher-level tools on top of DTrace or by using it heavily and/or in a critical role. That said, we also don’t want to be exclusionary, so our thinking is that the only true requirement for attending is that everyone must be prepared to speak informally for 15 mins or so on what they are doing with DTrace, any limitations that they have encountered, and some ideas for the future. We’re thinking that this is going to be on the order of 15-30 people (though more would be a good problem to have — we’ll track it if necessary), that it will be one full day (breakfast in the morning through drinks into the evening), and that we’re going to host it here at our offices in San Francisco sometime in March 2008. This same note also included some suggested names for the gathering, including what in hindsight seems a clear winner: DTrace Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con. As if knowing that I should leave an explanatory note to my future self as to why this name was not selected, my past self fortunately clarified: "before everyone clamors for the obvious Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con, you should know that most Millennials don’t (sadly) get the reference." (While I disagree with the judgement of my past self, it at least indicates that at some point I cared if anyone got the reference.) We settled on a much more obscure reference, and had the first dtrace.conf in March 2008. Befitting the style of the time, it was an unconference (a term that may well have hit its apogee in 2008) that you signed up to attend by editing a wiki. More surprising given the year (and thanks entirely to attendee Ben Rockwood), it was recorded — though this is so long ago that I referred to it as video taping (and with none of the participants mic’d, I’m afraid the quality isn’t very good). The conference, however, was terrific, viz. the reports of Adam, Keith and Stephen (all somehow still online nearly two decades later). If anything, it was a little too good: we realized that we couldn’t recreate the magic, and we demurred on making it an annual event. Years passed, and memories faded. By 2012, it felt like we wanted to get folks together again, now under a post-lawnmower corporate aegis in Joyent. The resulting dtrace.conf(12) was a success, and the Olympiad cadence felt like the right one; we did it again four years later at dtrace.conf(16). In 2020, we came back together for a new adventure — and the DTrace Olympiad was not lost on Adam. Alas, dtrace.conf(20) — like the Olympics themselves — was cancelled, if implicitly. Unlike the Olympics, however, it was not to be rescheduled. More years passed and DTrace continued to prove its utility at Oxide; last year when Adam and I did our "DTrace at 20" episode of Oxide and Friends, we vowed to hold dtrace.conf(24) — and a few months ago, we set our date to be December 11th. At first we assumed we would do something similar to our earlier conferences: a one-day participant-run conference, at the Oxide office in Emeryville. But times have changed: thanks to the rise of remote work, technologists are much more dispersed — and many more people would need to travel for dtrace.conf(24) than in previous DTrace Olympiads. Travel hasn’t become any cheaper since 2008, and the cost (and inconvenience) was clearly going to limit attendance. The dilemma for our small meetup highlights the changing dynamics in tech conferences in general: with talks all recorded and made publicly available after the conference, how does one justify attending a conference in person? There can be reasonable answers to that question, of course: it may be the hallway track, or the expo hall, or the after-hours socializing, or perhaps some other special conference experience. But it’s also not surprising that some conferences — especially ones really focused on technical content — have decided that they are better off doing as conference giant O’Reilly Media did, and going exclusively online. And without the need to feed and shelter participants, the logistics for running a conference become much more tenable — and the price point can be lowered to the point that even highly produced conferences like P99 CONF can be made freely available. This, in turn, leads to much greater attendance — and a network effect that can get back some of what one might lose going online. In particular, using chat as the hallway track can be more much effective (and is certainly more scalable!) than the actual physical hallways at a conference. For conferences in general, there is a conversation to be had here (and as a teaser, Adam and I are going to talk about it with Stephen O’Grady and Theo Schlossnagle on Oxide and Friends next week, but for our quirky, one-day, Olympiad-cadence dtrace.conf, the decision was pretty easy: there was much more to be gained than lost by going exclusively on-line. So dtrace.conf(24) is coming up next week, and it’s available to everyone. In terms of platform, we’re going to try to keep that pretty simple: we’re going to use Google Meet for the actual presenters, which we will stream in real-time to YouTube — and we’ll use the Oxide Discord for all chat. We’re hoping you’ll join us on December 11th — and if you want to talk about DTrace or a DTrace-adjacent topic, we’d love for you to present! Keeping to the unconference style, if you would like to present, please indicate your topic in the #session-topics Discord channel so we can get the agenda fleshed out. While we’re excited to be online, there are some historical accoutrements of conferences that we didn’t want to give up. First, we have a tradition of t-shirts with dtrace.conf. Thanks to our designer Ben Leonard, we have a banger of a t-shirt, capturing the spirit of our original dtrace.conf(08) shirt but with an Oxide twist. It’s (obviously) harder to make those free but we have tried to price them reasonably. You can get your t-shirt by adding it to your (free) dtrace.conf ticket. (And for those who present at dtrace.conf, your shirt is on us — we’ll send you a coupon code!) Second, for those who can make their way to the East Bay and want some hangout time, we are going to have an après conference social event at the Oxide office starting at 5p. We’re charging something nominal for that too (and like the t-shirt, you pay for that via your dtrace.conf ticket); we’ll have some food and drinks and an Oxide hardware tour for the curious — and (of course?) there will be Fishpong. Much has changed since I sent that e-mail 17 years ago — but the shared values and disposition that brought together our small community continue to endure; we look forward to seeing everyone (virtually) at dtrace.conf(24)!
Oxide Computer Company and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Work Together to Advance Cloud and HPC Convergence Oxide Computer Company and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) today announced a plan to bring on-premises cloud computing capabilities to the Livermore Computing (LC) high-performance computing (HPC) center. The rack-scale Oxide Cloud Computer allows LLNL to improve the efficiency of operational workloads and will provide users in the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) with new capabilities for provisioning secure, virtualized services alongside HPC workloads. HPC centers have traditionally run batch workloads for large-scale scientific simulations and other compute-heavy applications. HPC workloads do not exist in isolation—there are a multitude of persistent, operational services that keep the HPC center running. Meanwhile, HPC users also want to deploy cloud-like persistent services—databases, Jupyter notebooks, orchestration tools, Kubernetes clusters. Clouds have developed extensive APIs, security layers, and automation to enable these capabilities, but few options exist to deploy fully virtualized, automated cloud environments on-premises. The Oxide Cloud Computer allows organizations to deliver secure cloud computing capabilities within an on-premises environment. On-premises environments are the next frontier for cloud computing. LLNL is tackling some of the hardest and most important problems in science and technology, requiring advanced hardware, software, and cloud capabilities. We are thrilled to be working with their exceptional team to help advance those efforts, delivering an integrated system that meets their rigorous requirements for performance, efficiency, and security. — Steve TuckCEO at Oxide Computer Company Leveraging the new Oxide Cloud Computer, LLNL will enable staff to provision virtual machines (VMs) and services via self-service APIs, improving operations and modernizing aspects of system management. In addition, LLNL will use the Oxide rack as a proving ground for secure multi-tenancy and for smooth integration with the LLNL-developed Flux resource manager. LLNL plans to bring its users cloud-like Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities that work seamlessly with their HPC jobs, while maintaining security and isolation from other users. Beyond LLNL personnel, researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories will also partner in many of the activities on the Oxide Cloud Computer. We look forward to working with Oxide to integrate this machine within our HPC center. Oxide’s Cloud Computer will allow us to securely support new types of workloads for users, and it will be a proving ground for introducing cloud-like features to operational processes and user workflows. We expect Oxide’s open-source software stack and their transparent and open approach to development to help us work closely together. — Todd GamblinDistinguished Member of Technical Staff at LLNL Sandia is excited to explore the Oxide platform as we work to integrate on-premise cloud technologies into our HPC environment. This advancement has the potential to enable new classes of interactive and on-demand modeling and simulation capabilities. — Kevin PedrettiDistinguished Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories LLNL plans to work with Oxide on additional capabilities, including the deployment of additional Cloud Computers in its environment. Of particular interest are scale-out capabilities and disaster recovery. The latest installation underscores Oxide Computer’s momentum in the federal technology ecosystem, providing reliable, state-of-the-art Cloud Computers to support critical IT infrastructure. To learn more about Oxide Computer, visit https://oxide.computer. About Oxide Computer Oxide Computer Company is the creator of the world’s first commercial Cloud Computer, a true rack-scale system with fully unified hardware and software, purpose-built to deliver hyperscale cloud computing to on-premises data centers. With Oxide, organizations can fully realize the economic and operational benefits of cloud ownership, with access to the same self-service development experience of public cloud, without the public cloud cost. Oxide empowers developers to build, run, and operate any application with enhanced security, latency, and control, and frees organizations to elevate IT operations to accelerate strategic initiatives. To learn more about Oxide’s Cloud Computer, visit oxide.computer. About LLNL Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory provides solutions to our nation’s most important national security challenges through innovative science, engineering, and technology. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Media Contact LaunchSquad for Oxide Computer oxide@launchsquad.com
We are heartbroken to relay that Charles Beeler, a friend and early investor in Oxide, passed away in September after a battle with cancer. We lost Charles far too soon; he had a tremendous influence on the careers of us both. Our relationship with Charles dates back nearly two decades, to his involvement with the ACM Queue board where he met Bryan. It was unprecedented to have a venture capitalist serve in this capacity with ACM, and Charles brought an entirely different perspective on the practitioner content. A computer science pioneer who also served on the board took Bryan aside at one point: "Charles is one of the good ones, you know." When Bryan joined Joyent a few years later, Charles also got to know Steve well. Seeing the promise in both node.js and cloud computing, Charles became an investor in the company. When companies hit challenging times, some investors will hide — but Charles was the kind of investor to figure out how to fix what was broken. When Joyent needed a change in executive leadership, it was Charles who not only had the tough conversations, but led the search for the leader the company needed, ultimately positioning the company for success. Aside from his investment in Joyent, Charles was an outspoken proponent of node.js, becoming an organizer of the Node Summit conference. In 2017, he asked Bryan to deliver the conference’s keynote, but by then, the relationship between Joyent and node.js had become… complicated, and Bryan felt that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea. Any rational person would have dropped it, but Charles persisted, with characteristic zeal: if the Joyent relationship with node.js had become strained, so much more the reason to speak candidly about it! Charles prevailed, and the resulting talk, Platform as Reflection of Values, became one of Bryan’s most personally meaningful talks. Charles’s persistence was emblematic: he worked behind the scenes to encourage people to do their best work, always with an enthusiasm for the innovators and the creators. As we were contemplating Oxide, we told Charles what we wanted to do long before we had a company. Charles laughed with delight: "I hoped that you two would do something big, and I am just so happy for you that you’re doing something so ambitious!" As we raised seed capital, we knew that we were likely a poor fit for Charles and his fund. But we also knew that we deeply appreciated his wisdom and enthusiasm; we couldn’t resist pitching him on Oxide. Charles approached the investment in Oxide as he did with so many other aspects: with curiosity, diligence, empathy, and candor. He was direct with us that despite his enthusiasm for us personally, Oxide would be a challenging investment for his firm. But he also worked with us to address specific objections, and ultimately he won over his partnership. We were thrilled when he not only invested, but pulled together a syndicate of like-minded technologists and entrepreneurs to join him. Ever since, he has been a huge Oxide fan. Befitting his enthusiasm, one of his final posts expressed his enthusiasm and pride in what the Oxide team has built. Charles, thank you. You told us you were proud of us — and it meant the world. We are gutted to no longer have you with us; your influence lives on not just in Oxide, but also in the many people that you have inspired. You were the best of venture capital. Closer to the heart, you were a terrific friend to us both; thank you.
Here’s a sobering thought: today, data centers already consume 1-2% of the world’s power, and that percentage will likely rise to 3-4% by the end of the decade. According to Goldman Sachs research, that rise will include a doubling in data center carbon dioxide emissions. As the data and AI boom progresses, this thirst for power shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Two key challenges quickly become evident for the 85% of IT that currently lives on-premises. How can organizations reduce power consumption and corresponding carbon emissions? How can organizations keep pace with AI innovation as existing data centers run out of available power? Figure 1. Masanet et al. (2020), Cisco, IEA, Goldman Sachs Research Rack-scale design is critical to improved data center efficiency Traditional data center IT consumes so much power because the fundamental unit of compute is an individual server; like a house where rooms were built one at a time, with each room having its own central AC unit, gas furnace, and electrical panel. Individual rackmount servers are stacked together, each with their own AC power supplies, cooling fans, and power management. They are then paired with storage appliances and network switches that communicate at arm’s length, not designed as a cohesive whole. This approach fundamentally limits organizations' ability to maintain sustainable, high-efficiency computing systems. Of course, hyperscale public cloud providers did not design their data center systems this way. Instead, they operate like a carefully planned smart home where everything is designed to work together cohesively and is operated by software that understands the home’s systems end-to-end. High-efficiency, rack-scale computers are deployed at scale and operate as a single unit with integrated storage and networking to support elastic cloud computing services. This modern archietecture is made available to the market as public cloud, but that rental-only model is ill-fit for many business needs. Compared to a popular rackmount server vendor, Oxide is able to fill our specialized racks with 32 AMD Milan sleds and highly-available network switches using less than 15kW per rack, doubling the compute density in a typical data center. With just 16 of the alternative 1U servers and equivalent network switches, over 16kW of power is required per rack, leading to only 1,024 CPU cores vs Oxide’s 2,048. Extracting more useful compute from each kW of power and square foot of data center space is key to the future effectiveness of on-premises computing. At Oxide, we’ve taken this lesson in advancing rack-scale design, improved upon it in several ways, and made it available for every organization to purchase and operate anywhere in the world without a tether back to the public cloud. Our Cloud Computer treats the entire rack as a single, unified computer rather than a collection of independent parts, achieving unprecedented power efficiency. By designing the hardware and software together, we’ve eliminated unnecessary components and optimized every aspect of system operation through a control plane with visibility to end-to-end operations. When we started Oxide, the DC bus bar stood as one of the most glaring differences between the rack-scale machines at the hyperscalers and the rack-and-stack servers that the rest of the market was stuck with. That a relatively simple piece of copper was unavailable to commercial buyers — despite being unequivocally the right way to build it! — represented everything wrong with the legacy approach. The bus bar in the Oxide Cloud Computer is not merely more efficient, it is a concrete embodiment of the tremendous gains from designing at rack-scale, and by integrating hardware with software. — Bryan Cantrill The improvements we’re seeing are rooted in technical innovation Replacing low-efficiency AC power supplies with a high-efficiency DC Bus Bar This eliminates the 70 total AC power supplies found in an equivalent legacy server rack within 32 servers, two top-of-rack switches, and one out-of-band switch, each with two AC power supplies. This power shelf also ensures the load is balanced across phases, something that’s impossible with traditional power distribution units found in legacy server racks. Bigger fans = bigger efficiency gains using 12x less energy than legacy servers, which each contain as many as 7 fans, which must work much harder to move air over system components. Purpose-built for power efficiency less restrictive airflow than legacy servers by eliminating extraneous components like PCIe risers, storage backplanes, and more. Legacy servers need many optional components like these because they could be used for any number of tasks, such as point-of-sale systems, data center servers, or network-attached-storage (NAS) systems. Still, they were never designed optimally for any one of those tasks. The Oxide Cloud Computer was designed from the ground up to be a rack-scale cloud computing powerhouse, and so it’s optimized for exactly that task. Hardware + Software designed together By designing the hardware and software together, we can make hardware choices like more intelligent DC-DC power converters that can provide rich telemetry to our control plane, enabling future feature enhancements such as dynamic power capping and efficiency-based workload placement that are impossible with legacy servers and software systems. Learn more about Oxide’s intelligent Power Shelf Controller The Bottom Line: Customers and the Environment Both Benefit Reducing data center power demands and achieving more useful computing per kilowatt requires fundamentally rethinking traditional data center utilization and compute design. At Oxide, we’ve proven that dramatic efficiency gains are possible when you rethink the computer at rack-scale with hardware and software designed thoughtfully and rigorously together. Ready to learn how your organization can achieve these results? Schedule time with our team here. Together, we can reclaim on-premises computing efficiency to achieve both business and sustainability goals.
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This is re-post of How to Permanently Increase Your Sales by 50% or More in Only One Day article by Steve Pavlina Of all the things you can do to increase your sales, one of the highest leverage activities is attempting to increase your products’ registration rate. Increasing your registration rate from 1.0% to 1.5% means that you simply convince one more downloader out of every 200 to make the decision to buy. Yet that same tiny increase will literally increase your sales by a full 50%. If you’re one of those developers who simply slapped the ubiquitous 30-day trial incentive on your shareware products without going any further than that, then I think a 50% increase in your registration rate is a very attainable goal you can achieve if you spend just one full day of concentrated effort on improving your product’s ability to sell. My hope is that this article will get you off to a good start and get you thinking more creatively. And even if you fail, your result might be that you achieve only a 25% or a 10% increase. How much additional money would that represent to you over the next five years of sales? What influence, if any, did the title of this article have on your decision to read it? If I had titled this article, “Registration Incentives,” would you have been more or less likely to read it now? Note that the title expresses a specific and clear benefit to you. It tells you exactly what you can expect to gain by reading it. Effective registration incentives work the same way. They offer clear, specific benefits to the user if a purchase is made. In order to improve your registration incentives, the first thing you need to do is to adopt some new beliefs that will change your perspective. I’m going to introduce you to what I call the “lies of success” in the shareware industry. These are statements that are not true at all, but if you accept them as true anyway, you’ll achieve far better results than if you don’t. Rule 1: What you are selling is merely the difference between the shareware and the registered versions, not the registered version itself. Note that this is not a true statement, but if you accept it as true, you’ll immediately begin to see the weaknesses in your registration incentives. If there are few additional benefits for buying the full version vs. using the shareware version, then you aren’t offering the user strong enough incentives to make the full purchase. Rule 2: The sole purpose of the shareware version is to close the sale. This is our second lie of success. Note the emphasis on the word “close.” Your shareware version needs to act as a direct sales vehicle. It must be able to take the user all the way to the point of purchase, i.e. your online order form, ideally with nothing more than a few mouse clicks. Anything that detracts from achieving a quick sale is likely to hurt sales. Rule 3: The customer’s perspective is the only one that matters. Defy this rule at your peril. Customers don’t care that you spent 2000 hours creating your product. Customers don’t care that you deserve the money for your hard work. Customers don’t care that you need to do certain things to prevent piracy. All that matters to them are their own personal wants and needs. Yes, these are lies of success. Some customers will care, but if you design your registration incentives assuming they only care about their own self-interests, your motivation to buy will be much stronger than if you merely appeal to their sense of honesty, loyalty, or honor. Assume your customers are all asking, “What’s in it for me if I choose to buy? What will I get? How will this help me?” I don’t care if you’re selling to Fortune 500 companies. At some point there will be an individual responsible for causing the purchase to happen, and that individual is going to consider how the purchase will affect him/her personally: “Will this purchase get me fired? Will it make me look good in front of my peers? Will this make my job easier or harder?” Many shareware developers get caught in the trap of discriminating between honest and dishonest users, believing that honest users will register and dishonest ones won’t. This line of thinking will ultimately get you nowhere, and it violates the third lie of success. When you make a purchase decision, how often do you use honesty as the deciding factor? Do you ever say, “I will buy this because I’m honest?” Or do you consider other more selfish factors first, such as how it will make you feel to purchase the software? The truth is that every user believes s/he is honest, so no user applies the honesty criterion when making a purchase decision. Thinking of your users in terms of honest ones vs. dishonest ones is a complete waste of time because that’s not how users primarily view themselves. Rule 4: Customers buy on emotion and justify with fact. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll see that this is how you make most purchase decisions. Remember the last time you bought a computer. Is it fair to say that you first became emotionally attached to the idea of owning a new machine? For me, it’s the feeling of working faster, owning the latest technology, and being more productive that motivates me to go computer shopping. Once I’ve become emotionally committed, the justifications follow: “It’s been two years since I’ve upgraded, it will pay for itself with the productivity boost I gain, I can easily afford it, I’ve worked hard and I deserve a new machine, etc.” You use facts to justify the purchase. Once you understand how purchase decisions are made, you can see that your shareware products need to first get the user emotionally invested in the purchase, and then you give them all the facts they need to justify it. Now that we’ve gotten these four lies of success out of the way, let’s see how we might apply them to create some compelling registration incentives. Let’s start with Rule 1. What incentives can be spawned from this rule? The common 30-day trial is one obvious derivative. If you are only selling the difference between the shareware and registered versions, then a 30-day trial implies that you are selling unlimited future days of usage of the program after the trial period expires. This is a powerful incentive, and it’s been proven effective for products that users will continue to use month after month. 30-day trials are easy for users to understand, and they’re also easy to implement. You could also experiment with other time periods such as 10 days, 14 days, or 90 days. The only way of truly knowing which will work best for your products is to experiment. But let’s see if we can move a bit beyond the basic 30-day trial here by mixing in a little of Rule 3. How would the customer perceive a 30-day trial? In most cases 30 days is plenty of time to evaluate a product. But in what situations would a 30-day trial have a negative effect? A good example is when the user downloads, installs, and briefly checks out a product s/he may not have time to evaluate right away. By the time the user gets around to fully evaluating it, the shareware version has already expired, and a sale may be lost as a result. To get around this limitation, many shareware developers have started offering 30 days of actual program usage instead of 30 consecutive days. This allows the user plenty of time to try out the program at his/her convenience. Another possibility would be to limit the number of times the program can be run. The basic idea is that you are giving away limited usage and selling unlimited usage of the program. This incentive definitely works if your product is one that will be used frequently over a long period of time (much longer than the trial period). The flip side of usage limitation is to offer an additional bonus for buying within a certain period of time. For instance, in my game Dweep, I offer an extra 5 free bonus levels to everyone who buys within the first 10 days. In truth I give the bonus levels to everyone who buys, but the incentive is real from the customer’s point of view. Remember Rule 3 - it doesn’t matter what happens on my end; it only matters what the customer perceives. Any customer that buys after the first 10 days will be delighted anyway to receive a bonus they thought they missed. So if your product has no time-based incentives at all, this is the first place to start. When would you pay your bills if they were never due, and no interest was charged on late payments? Use time pressure to your advantage, either by disabling features in the shareware version after a certain time or by offering additional bonuses for buying sooner rather than later. If nothing else and if it’s legal in your area, offer a free entry in a random monthly drawing for a small prize, such as one of your other products, for anyone who buys within the first X days. Another logical derivative of Rule 1 is the concept of feature limitation. On the crippling side, you can start with the registered version and begin disabling functionality to create the shareware version. Disabling printing in a shareware text editor is a common strategy. So is corrupting your program’s output with a simple watermark. For instance, your shareware editor could print every page with your logo in the background. Years ago the Association of Shareware Professionals had a strict policy against crippling, but that policy was abandoned, and crippling has been recognized as an effective registration incentive. It is certainly possible to apply feature limitation without having it perceived as crippling. This is especially easy for games, which commonly offer a limited number of playable levels in the shareware version with many more levels available only in the registered version. In this situation you offer the user a seemingly complete experience of your product in the shareware version, and you provide additional features on top of that for the registered version. Time-based incentives and feature-based incentives are perhaps the two most common strategies used by shareware developers for enticing users to buy. Which will work best for you? You will probably see the best results if you use both at the same time. Imagine you’re the end user for a moment. Would you be more likely to buy if you were promised additional features and given a deadline to make the decision? I’ve seen several developers who were using only one of these two strategies increase their registration rates dramatically by applying the second strategy on top of the first. If you only use time-based limitations, how could you apply feature limitation as well? Giving the user more reasons to buy will translate to more sales per download. One you have both time-based and feature-based incentives to buy, the next step is to address the user’s perceived risk by applying a risk-reversal strategy. Fortunately, the shareware model already reduces the perceived risk of purchasing significantly, since the user is able to try before buying. But let’s go a little further, keeping Rule 3 in mind. What else might be a perceived risk to the user? What if the user reaches the end of the trial period and still isn’t certain the product will do what s/he needs? What if the additional features in the registered version don’t work as the user expects? What can we do to make the decision to purchase safer for the user? One approach is to offer a money-back guarantee. I’ve been offering a 60-day unconditional money-back guarantee on all my products since January 2000. If someone asks for their money back for any reason, I give them a full refund right away. So what is my return rate? Well, it’s about 8%. Just kidding! Would it surprise you to learn that my return rate at the time of this writing is less than 0.2%? Could you handle two returns out of every 1000 sales? My best estimate is that this one technique increased my sales by 5-10%, and it only took a few minutes to implement. When I suggest this strategy to other shareware developers, the usual reaction is fear. “But everyone would rip me off,” is a common response. I suggest trying it for yourself on an experimental basis; a few brave souls have already tried it and are now offering money-back guarantees prominently. Try putting it up on your web site for a while just to convince yourself it works. You can take it down at any time. After a few months, if you’re happy with the results, add the guarantee to your shareware products as well. I haven’t heard of one bad outcome yet from those who’ve tried it. If you use feature limitation in your shareware products, another important component of risk reversal is to show the user exactly what s/he will get in the full version. In Dweep I give away the first five levels in the demo version, and purchasing the full version gets you 147 more levels. When I thought about this from the customer’s perspective (Rule 3), I realized that a perceived risk is that s/he doesn’t know if the registered version levels will be as fun as the demo levels. So I released a new demo where you can see every level but only play the first five. This lets the customer see all the fun that awaits them. So if you have a feature-limited product, show the customer how the feature will work. For instance, if your shareware version has printing disabled, the customer could be worried that the full version’s print capability won’t work with his/her printer or that the output quality will be poor. A better strategy is to allow printing, but to watermark the output. This way the customer can still test and verify the feature, and it doesn’t take much imagination to realize what the output will look like without the watermark. Our next step is to consider Rule 2 and include the ability close the sale. It is imperative that you include an “instant gratification” button in your shareware products, so the customer can click to launch their default web browser and go directly to your online order form. If you already have a “buy now” button in your products, go a step further. A small group of us have been finding that the more liberally these buttons are used, the better. If you only have one or two of these buttons in your shareware program, you should increase the count by at least an order of magnitude. The current Dweep demo now has over 100 of these buttons scattered throughout the menus and dialogs. This makes it extremely easy for the customer to buy, since s/he never has to hunt around for the ordering link. What should you label these buttons? “Buy now” or “Register now” are popular, so feel free to use one of those. I took a slightly different approach by trying to think like a customer (Rule 3 again). As a customer the word “buy” has a slightly negative association for me. It makes me think of parting with my cash, and it brings up feelings of sacrifice and pressure. The words “buy now” imply that I have to give away something. So instead, I use the words, “Get now.” As a customer I feel much better about getting something than buying something, since “getting” brings up only positive associations. This is the psychology I use, but at present, I don’t know of any hard data showing which is better. Unless you have a strong preference, trust your intuition. Make it as easy as possible for the willing customer to buy. The more methods of payment you accept, the better your sales will be. Allow the customer to click a button to print an order form directly from your program and mail it with a check or money order. On your web order form, include a link to a printable text order form for those who are afraid to use their credit cards online. If you only accept two or three major credit cards, sign up with a registration service to handle orders for those you don’t accept. So far we’ve given the customer some good incentives to buy, minimized perceived risk, and made it easy to make the purchase. But we haven’t yet gotten the customer emotionally invested in making the purchase decision. That’s where Rule 4 comes in. First, we must recognize the difference between benefits and features. We need to sell the sizzle, not the steak. Features describe your product, while benefits describe what the user will get by using your product. For instance, a personal information manager (PIM) program may have features such as daily, weekly, and monthly views; task and event timers; and a contact database. However, the benefits of the program might be that it helps the user be more organized, earn more money, and enjoy more free time. For a game, the main benefit might be fun. For a nature screensaver, it could be relaxation, beauty appreciation, or peace. Features are logical; benefits are emotional. Logical features are an important part of the sale, but only after we’ve engaged the customer’s emotions. Many products do a fair job of getting the customer emotionally invested during the trial period. If you have an addictive program or one that’s fun to use, such as a game, you may have an easy time getting the customer emotionally attached to using it because the experience is already emotional in nature. But whatever your product is, you can increase your sales by clearly illustrating the benefits of making the purchase. A good place to do this is in your nag screens. I use nag screens both before and after the program runs to remind the user of the benefits of buying the full version. At the very least, include a nag screen when the customer exits the program, so the last thing s/he sees will be a reminder of the product’s benefits. Take this opportunity to sell the user on the product. Don’t expect features like “customizable colors” to motivate anyone to buy. Paint a picture of what benefits the user will obtain with the full version. Will I save time? Will I have more fun? Will I live longer, save money, or feel better? The simple change from feature-oriented selling to benefit-oriented selling can easily double or triple your sales. Be sure to use this approach on your web site as well if you don’t already. Developers who’ve recently made the switch have been reporting some amazing results. If you’re drawing a blank when trying to come up with benefits for your products, the best thing you can do is to email some of your old customers and ask them why they bought your program. What did it do for them? I’ve done this and was amazed at the answers I got back. People were buying my games for reasons I’d never anticipated, and that told me which benefits I needed to emphasize in my sales pitch. The next key is to make your offer irresistible to potential customers. Find ways to offer the customer so much value that it would be harder to say no than to say yes. Take a look at your shareware product as if you were a potential customer who’d never seen it before. Being totally honest with yourself, would you buy this program if someone else had written it? If not, don’t stop here. As a potential customer, what additional benefits or features would put you over the top and convince you to buy? More is always better than less. In the original version of Dweep, I offered ten levels in the demo and thirty in the registered version. Now I offer only five demo levels and 152 in the full version, plus a built-in level editor. Originally, I offered the player twice the value of the demo; now I’m offering over thirty times the value. I also offer free hints and solutions to every level; the benefit here is that it minimizes player frustration. As I keep adding bonuses for purchasing, the offer becomes harder and harder to resist. What clever bonuses can you throw in for registering? Take the time to watch an infomercial. Notice that there is always at least one “FREE” bonus thrown in. Consider offering a few extra filters for an image editor, ten extra images for a screensaver, or extra levels for a game. What else might appeal to your customers? Be creative. Your bonus doesn’t even have to be software-based. Offer a free report about building site traffic with your HTML editor, include an essay on effective time management with your scheduling program, or throw in a small business success guide with your billing program. If you make such programs, you shouldn’t have too much trouble coming up with a few pages of text that would benefit your customers. Keep working at it until your offer even looks irresistible to you. If all the bonuses you offer can be delivered electronically, how many can you afford to include? If each one only gains one more customer in a thousand (0.1%), would it be worth the effort over the lifetime of your sales? So how do you know if your registration incentives are strong enough? And how do you know if your product is over-crippled? Where do you draw the line? These are tough issues, but there is a good way to handle them if your product is likely to be used over a long period of time, particularly if it’s used on a daily basis. Simply make your program gradually increase its registration incentives over time. One easy way to do this is with a delay timer on your nag screens that increases each time the program is run. Another approach is to disable certain features at set intervals. You begin by disabling non-critical features and gradually move up to disabling key functionality. The program becomes harder and harder to continue using for free, so the benefits of registering become more and more compelling. Instead of having your program completely disable itself after your trial period, you gradually degrade its usability with additional usage. This approach can be superior to a strict 30-day trial, since it allows your program to still be used for a while, but after prolonged usage it becomes effectively unusable. However, you don’t simply shock the user by taking away all the benefits s/he has become accustomed to on a particular day. Instead, you begin with a gentle reminder that becomes harder and harder to ignore. There may be times when your 30-day trial shuts off at an inconvenient time for the user, and you may lose a sale as a result. For instance, the user may not have the money at the time, or s/he may be busy at the trial’s end and forget to register. In that case s/he may quickly replace what was lost with a competitor’s trial version. The gradual degradation approach allows the user to continue using your product, but with increasing difficulty over time. Eventually, there is a breaking point where the user either decides to buy or to stop using the program completely, but this can be done within a window of time at the user’s convenience. Hopefully this article has gotten you thinking creatively about all the overlooked ways you can entice people to buy your shareware products. The most important thing you can do is to begin seeing your products through your customers’ eyes. What additional motivation would convince you to buy? What would represent an irresistible offer to you? There is no limit to how many incentives you can add. Don’t stop at just one or two; instead, give the customer a half dozen or more reasons to buy, and you’ll see your registration rate soar. Is it worth spending a day to do this? I think so.
I'm a big (neo)vim buff. My config is over 1500 lines and I regularly write new scripts. I recently ported my neovim config to a new laptop. Before then, I was using VSCode to write, and when I switched back I immediately saw a big gain in productivity. People often pooh-pooh vim (and other assistive writing technologies) by saying that writing code isn't the bottleneck in software development. Reading, understanding, and thinking through code is! Now I don't know how true this actually is in practice, because empirical studies of time spent coding are all over the place. Most of them, like this study, track time spent in the editor but don't distinguish between time spent reading code and time spent writing code. The only one I found that separates them was this study. It finds that developers spend only 5% of their time editing. It also finds they spend 14% of their time moving or resizing editor windows, so I don't know how clean their data is. But I have a bigger problem with "writing is not the bottleneck": when I think of a bottleneck, I imagine that no amount of improvement will lead to productivity gains. Like if a program is bottlenecked on the network, it isn't going to get noticeably faster with 100x more ram or compute. But being able to type code 100x faster, even with without corresponding improvements to reading and imagining code, would be huge. We'll assume the average developer writes at 80 words per minute, at five characters a word, for 400 characters a minute.What could we do if we instead wrote at 8,000 words/40k characters a minute? Writing fast Boilerplate is trivial Why do people like type inference? Because writing all of the types manually is annoying. Why don't people like boilerplate? Because it's annoying to write every damn time. Programmers like features that help them write less! That's not a problem if you can write all of the boilerplate in 0.1 seconds. You still have the problem of reading boilerplate heavy code, but you can use the remaining 0.9 seconds to churn out an extension that parses the file and presents the boilerplate in a more legible fashion. We can write more tooling This is something I've noticed with LLMs: when I can churn out crappy code as a free action, I use that to write lots of tools that assist me in writing good code. Even if I'm bottlenecked on a large program, I can still quickly write a script that helps me with something. Most of these aren't things I would have written because they'd take too long to write! Again, not the best comparison, because LLMs also shortcut learning the relevant APIs, so also optimize the "understanding code" part. Then again, if I could type real fast I could more quickly whip up experiments on new apis to learn them faster. We can do practices that slow us down in the short-term Something like test-driven development significantly slows down how fast you write production code, because you have to spend a lot more time writing test code. Pair programming trades speed of writing code for speed of understanding code. A two-order-of-magnitude writing speedup makes both of them effectively free. Or, if you're not an eXtreme Programming fan, you can more easily follow the The Power of Ten Rules and blanket your code with contracts and assertions. We could do more speculative editing This is probably the biggest difference in how we'd work if we could write 100x faster: it'd be much easier to try changes to the code to see if they're good ideas in the first place. How often have I tried optimizing something, only to find out it didn't make a difference? How often have I done a refactoring only to end up with lower-quality code overall? Too often. Over time it makes me prefer to try things that I know will work, and only "speculatively edit" when I think it be a fast change. If I could code 100x faster it would absolutely lead to me trying more speculative edits. This is especially big because I believe that lots of speculative edits are high-risk, high-reward: given 50 things we could do to the code, 49 won't make a difference and one will be a major improvement. If I only have time to try five things, I have a 10% chance of hitting the jackpot. If I can try 500 things I will get that reward every single time. Processes are built off constraints There are just a few ideas I came up with; there are probably others. Most of them, I suspect, will share the same property in common: they change the process of writing code to leverage the speedup. I can totally believe that a large speedup would not remove a bottleneck in the processes we currently use to write code. But that's because those processes are developed work within our existing constraints. Remove a constraint and new processes become possible. The way I see it, if our current process produces 1 Utils of Software / day, a 100x writing speedup might lead to only 1.5 UoS/day. But there are other processes that produce only 0.5 UoS/d because they are bottlenecked on writing speed. A 100x speedup would lead to 10 UoS/day. The problem with all of this that 100x speedup isn't realistic, and it's not obvious whether a 2x improvement would lead to better processes. Then again, one of the first custom vim function scripts I wrote was an aid to writing unit tests in a particular codebase, and it lead to me writing a lot more tests. So maybe even a 2x speedup is going to be speed things up, too. Patreon Stuff I wrote a couple of TLA+ specs to show how to model fork-join algorithms. I'm planning on eventually writing them up for my blog/learntla but it'll be a while, so if you want to see them in the meantime I put them up on Patreon.
Here’s Jony Ive in his Stripe interview: What we make stands testament to who we are. What we make describes our values. It describes our preoccupations. It describes beautiful succinctly our preoccupation. I’d never really noticed the connection between these two words: occupation and preoccupation. What comes before occupation? Pre-occupation. What comes before what you do for a living? What you think about. What you’re preoccupied with. What you think about will drive you towards what you work on. So when you’re asking yourself, “What comes next? What should I work on?” Another way of asking that question is, “What occupies my thinking right now?” And if what you’re occupied with doesn’t align with what you’re preoccupied with, perhaps it's time for a change. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
There's no country on earth that does hype better than America. It's one of the most appealing aspects about being here. People are genuinely excited about the future and never stop searching for better ways to work, live, entertain, and profit. There's a unique critical mass in the US accelerating and celebrating tomorrow. The contrast to Europe couldn't be greater. Most Europeans are allergic to anything that even smells like a commercial promise of a better tomorrow. "Hype" is universally used as a term to ridicule anyone who dares to be excited about something new, something different. Only a fool would believe that real progress is possible! This is cultural bedrock. The fault lines have been settling for generations. It'll take an earthquake to move them. You see this in AI, you saw it in the Internet. Europeans are just as smart, just as inventive as their American brethren, but they don't do hype, so they're rarely the ones able to sell the sizzle that public opinion requires to shift its vision for tomorrow. To say I have a complicated relationship with venture capital is putting it mildly. I've spent a career proving the counter narrative. Proving that you can build and bootstrap an incredible business without investor money, still leave a dent in the universe, while enjoying the spoils of capitalism. And yet... I must admit that the excesses of venture capital are integral to this uniquely American advantage on hype. The lavish overspending during the dot-com boom led directly to a spectacular bust, but it also built the foundation of the internet we all enjoy today. Pets.com and Webvan flamed out such that Amazon and Shopify could transform ecommerce out of the ashes. We're in the thick of peak hype on AI right now. Fantastical sums are chasing AGI along with every dumb derivative mirage along the way. The most outrageous claims are being put forth on the daily. It's easy to look at that spectacle with European eyes and roll them. Some of it is pretty cringe! But I think that would be a mistake. You don't have to throw away your critical reasoning to accept that in the face of unknown potential, optimism beats pessimism. We all have to believe in something, and you're much better off believing that things can get better than not. Americans fundamentally believe this. They believe the hype, so they make it come to fruition. Not every time, not all of them, but more of them, more of the time than any other country in the world. That really is exceptional.
I’m working on a Go library appendstore for append-only store of lots of things in a single file. To make things as robust as possible I was calling os.File.Sync() after each append. Sync() is waiting until the data is acknowledged as truly, really written to disk (as opposed to maybe floating somewhere in disk drive’s write buffer). Oh boy, is it slow. A test of appending 1000 records would take over 5 seconds. After removing the Sync() it would drop to 5 milliseconds. 1000x faster. I made sync optional - it’s now up to the user of the library to pick it, defaults to non-sync. Is it unsafe now? Well, the reality is that it probably doesn’t matter. I don’t think lots of software does the sync due to slowness and the world still runs.