Oxide and Friends · 21 Dec 2025 · 1h 27m · Episode 35
Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal of Oxide Computer Company review their 2025 podcast year, highlighting a shift toward debugging episodes like 'Death by Uptime' and 'Futurelock' as the dominant theme. They discuss the community's reaction to their 'No Egress' image, the use of LLMs for episode summaries, and the company's $100 million funding round. The hosts also reflect on specific episodes such as 'Holistic Engineering' and 'Scaling Manufacturing,' while noting the importance of their engineering culture and hiring processes.
Where this conversation describes AI being used to build or deliver a product. Part of the AI in practice tracker.
Marketing & salesChatGPT
The hosts used ChatGPT to create an image for the episode 'Holistic Engineering', specifically to remove extraneous people from a photo of Robert Mustacchi at a whiteboard.
“So that that was like an AI assisted image. It was an image of Robert at a whiteboard drawing. The original image had, like, five other people in it that I thought were extraneous.”
Adam Leventhal · Hear it at 36:29
Marketing & salesChatGPT
The hosts used ChatGPT to generate a wrap-up summary of their podcast year, asking it to taxonomize episodes and identify themes like debugging.
“So I also did the experiment we did too of, you know, that's kinda like that it's been super busy and I just didn't have a huge amount of time to prepare for this. So you know, as you do, wanna see what our little LLM friends would how they would do a wrap up for this year.”
Bryan Cantrill · Hear it at 23:41
Marketing & salesGemini
The hosts used Gemini to generate a wrap-up summary of their podcast year, asking it to identify fan favorites and Gen X cultural references.
“so I asked Gemini the same thing and this got a little bit like weirder and a little more like both more accurate and less accurate. So first of all, it's like, well, first of all, you've got to talk about the Fox reality TV throwback in when async attacks, a clear reference to when animals attack, which I guess it kind of is.”
Bryan Cantrill · Hear it at 1:06:11
companies scaling up
Other shows on the same ground, closest first.
Jen Castillo and Alvaro Prieto of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast summarize their 2020 annual survey results, revealing a bimodal audience of software, firmware, and security engineers who value the show's knowledgeable guests and detailed show notes. They discuss the decision to launch a Patreon to fund better recording tools like Zencastr and potentially hire an editor, while addressing listener feedback on episode frequency, intro music volume, and the desire for more technical depth. The hosts also reflect on their production workflow, contrasting scripted remote interviews with unscripted live conference recordings, and announce plans for future Hackaday-related content.
Elecia White and Christopher White are joined by Nathan Jones and Chris Svec to review the Embedded.fm podcast's 2025 performance, discussing survey results that highlight listener appreciation for the show's diverse, underrepresented guests and its mission to foster STEM community. The group discusses specific episodes like the 'Giraffe butt birds' interview, the hosts' book 'Embedded Systems Programming', and the Foldscope microscope, while sharing personal engineering failures and lessons learned. They emphasize the value of the Slack community and the importance of maintaining a sustainable, human-centric approach to content creation.
Hosts Almero and Jen review the seven-year statistics of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast, noting 230,983 unique downloads and an average episode length of just over one hour. They discuss the evolution of their production workflow, moving from Audacity to Ferrite on iOS and using Zencastr for remote recording, while highlighting past guests like Ken Shiriff, Joe Grand, and Piotr Esden-Tempski. The episode also covers the hosts' decision to pause their Patreon due to reduced output and reflects on the fragmentation of social media platforms like Twitter and Mastodon.
Joe Schneider and Jacob Beningo interview founders Luca Ingianni and Jeff Gable of the Agile Embedded Podcast, discussing their origin story as solo consultants who started the show in 2021 without prior connection. The hosts share war stories about difficult debugging challenges, including a one-line interrupt fix that took five days and a temperature-dependent DDR RAM failure that required two months to resolve. They also analyze the current state of the industry, debating whether AI is following the Gartner hype cycle like Agile did and predicting a future focus on requirements engineering and AI integration in embedded development.
Chris Gammell and Dave Jones host Chris White and Alicia White of Embedded.fm to discuss the 256th episode milestone, the challenges of producing technical podcasts without visual aids, and the state of hardware conferences like Solid Con. The group debates the user experience of smartwatches, specifically the Pebble Time, focusing on the lack of out-of-the-box functionality and the industry trend of shipping incomplete firmware. They also touch on the importance of product management in ensuring quality and the frustrations engineers face when their technical concerns are ignored by management.
The summary, chapters and topics are generated from the episode’s audio by this directory, not written by Oxide and Friends. The episode itself belongs to its publisher.