Stickers

Started: 2026-04-05 21:39:58

Submitted: 2026-04-05 22:18:23

Visibility: World-readable

The stickers on my work laptop

Last week I turned in my work laptop, bringing me one step closer to closing the Rivos chapter in my life.

M1 MacBook Pro covered in stickers

When I started at Rivos in the summer of 2022, they gave me a budget to buy and expense my own laptop. This budget covered a 14-inch M1 MacBook Pro, which happened to be the same machine I helped build on at Apple. (The M2 machines, which I also worked on, were not released until early the next year. I named the laptop "Anubis", following my naming convention based on ships from the tv show The Expanse.) I started a careful program of collecting stickers to personalize my laptop and ended up with a perfectly-balanced work of art reflecting the last four years of my life.

The stickers pictured (clockwise, from the top left):

1. Monterey Bay Aquarium: I visited the aquarium in the week before I started at Rivos and picked up this wooden sticker in the gift shop specifically to use it on my new work laptop.
2. California State Railroad Museum: wooden sticker from my visit to the museum in 2023.
3. Open Titan: an open-source hardware project to create a secure root-of-trust with a 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller. We used the hardware design in our chip.
4. Disco ball: I think I got this attending a Pride parade but I don't remember any of the context around the sticker.
5. KCRW: Public radio station in Santa Monica I support.
6. WWHD: This is an obscure reference to my time on App Engine SRE. No one else will get it.
7. 841 in the 831: a reference to Otter 841, who became famous in Santa Cruz for stealing surfboards in 2023. (831 is the area code for Santa Cruz.)
8. BazelCon 2024: The 2024 conference for the build system I used at Rivos, released by Google as a public version of its internal build system. It's hard to use but extremely powerful.
9. Cats & Coffee: from Mountain Thunder Coffee Plantation on the Kona coast on the Big Island of Hawaii.
10. Circuit board in the shape of California: a sticker I picked up at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View two years ago. (At the same visit I picked up a sticker of an eraser with the text "mistakes were made" and applied it to my personal laptop.)
11. Verve Coffee: Santa Cruz's favorite third-wave coffee roaster, with retail coffee shops scattered around town and coffee sold in grocery stores. I visit them once or twice a week.
12. Nor*Cal: adapting the California state flag for my part of the state.

I don't know what comes next. Rivos was the best job I ever had and it'll be hard to find something that measures up.