I interviewed with them, a long long long time ago.
They use OCaml because it is explainable. Which it is. They use it like a non-lazy version of Haskell -- side effects are used rarely if ever. So there's no nonlocal behavior in the code, which makes it easy to reason about. And that kinda matters when a lot of money is at stake.
Incidentally, Standard Chartered has their own compiler for Haskell, without the laziness. The group is led by the guy famous for Cayenne (the first dependently typed Haskell dialect).
Single-mode fiber is future-proof. Utilities bury that stuff and depreciate it over a 30-year lifetime. There has been like one spec change since the 1970s.
All the switches in this series except the one in this review actually have two separate boards inside with a PCIe-over-cable connection between them. For example the SN2700 here (the sleeved cable in the third photo; you can't see the connector from the angle it's taken from):
Yes. The switchdev "sw1p[0-9]+" ports are special; the any data the software kernel injects to them is discarded and they never emit packets to the kernel. They exist only to allow you to use `ip bridge` and `ip route` on them. So if you accidentally configure software switching on these ports no data will flow -- it will be totally obvious. You might get "no packets" by accident but you will never get "software switching" by accident.
If you really want software switching you have to use the management port (there's only one or two of these) whose name is "eth0" or "eth1" or something like that. So avoiding "accidental software switching" is really easy -- if you're typing "eth" you're doing it wrong. You can even explicitly delete this interface if you don't need the CPU to be able to snoop/inject traffic to/from the switch ports.
The Linux switchdev driver is the awesome magic that says "make hardware-offloaded switching ASICs look just like software switching". It's beautiful and amazing, as you'd expect from Mellanox.
Having gone through this struggle myself, here's the cheat sheet. You want a device that uses the Linux switchdev driver and is supported by dentOS whether or not you actually choose to run dentOS on it (I run NixOS on my switch):
Switchdev support means you don't need hardware-specific userspace tools (with their own bizarre syntax to learn) in order to configure the switch.
DentOS support means the device uses a sane bootloader (uboot or grub) and the only binary blobs on the device will be the ones built into the bootloader (IntelME, Arm Trusted Firmware) and the switch firmware which will be part of linux-firmware (and therefore very easy to manage/update).
In particular, looking for these two keywords is how you make sure that the hardware vendor is staying on "their side of the line" between hardware and software. Violations of this line are endemic to 10G+ switching.
There's nothing illegal about this, although Hacker News for some reason has the peculiar belief that there is.
Any contract purporting to prevent an employee from earning money elsewhere is an illegal restraint of trade. Indeed the company would be the criminal if they tried to write this into their employment agreements.
Sylvia Bloom (c. 1919 – 2016) was an American legal secretary. By copying her bosses' investment decisions she secretly accumulated a significant fortune and donated the bulk of it—US$8.2 million—for scholarships for underprivileged students upon her death. She lived modestly in a rent-controlled apartment, and even her closest friends and family did not know about her wealth.
Bonus: you get a real keyboard.