When Blue Turns Green: A Personal Reflection on Debugging Nightmares
As Microsoft officially replaces its iconic Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) with a greener alternative, it felt like the right moment to share my own story, one that began with that exact blue screen and ultimately helped shape the vision behind NextSilicon.
I was probably nine when my weekends turned into epic Shabbat hackathons: while everyone else was flipping through novels and fiction books, I was nose-deep in assembly manuals—and especially my favorite, PC Internals, tracing op-codes like they were treasure maps. My world revolved around poking at kernels and coaxing them into doing things nobody thought possible. Back then, I had zero social life, just endless curiosity and a beat-up PC that felt like the coolest adventure playground ever.
When a Crash Wasn’t Just a Crash
The hardest bug I have ever debugged is detailed in my Quora answer, but there are details I couldn’t share there. This issue occurred on a PC that was traveling in a commercial vehicle that crashed routinely with no explanation. At first, the symptoms seemed completely unrelated and almost random, which made isolating the root cause incredibly frustrating. I spent hours chasing dead ends, from faulty drivers to physical memory errors, to no avail. Eventually, I shifted my focus from software to the physical environment in which the system was running—a key turning point in my investigation.
Using a custom driver I wrote that triggered a green screen, I realized the problem was at the disk level: physical shocks while the vehicle was moving caused intermittent failures. Because the drive’s cache was so large, the system didn’t crash immediately, but only long after the shocks, when the vehicle was at rest.
Beyond the Color and Toward Accessibility
I’ll admit, I was oddly pleased to see green take center stage (though a dash of NextSilicon purple might have been the perfect touch). Complex software that few understand is a challenge I know all too well. This debugging experience taught me something fundamental: even the most complex technical problems have solutions that bridge the gap between deep technical knowledge and real-world applications.
My personal journey, from debugging cryptic kernel panics to uncovering hardware-level anomalies, mirrors the very challenges researchers and developers face today. For too long, high-performance computing has required deep knowledge and domain-specific languages, software stacks, and tools–creating barriers rather than enabling breakthroughs.
The Maverick-2 vision is simple yet transformative: eliminate these technical prerequisites entirely. We want researchers focusing on scientific discoveries, not learning arcane computing internals. We want developers building revolutionary applications, not struggling with complex proprietary frameworks. By abstracting away the complexity that once required kernel-level expertise, NextSilicon empowers everyone to harness computational power for what truly matters—innovation and insight. Like that young boy who found joy in decoding mysterious kernel bugs on their PC, we're driven by the belief that technology should liberate imagination, not constrain it. Because when we remove technical barriers, we don't just accelerate computing—we accelerate human progress itself.
Stay Connected
Stay tuned as we share more details in future blogs and announcements via our Nextletter.
About the Author:
Elad Raz is the founder and CEO of NextSilicon, a company pioneering a radically new approach to HPC architecture that drives the industry forward by solving its biggest, most fundamental problems.
