TireFire Heavy Industries is a joint venture into engineering and manufacturing lead by Reid ‘arrdem’ McKenzie in collaboration with many other fine and people.

We are proud to have strategic relationsips with ShadyTel, Xantronix Industrial and macaw.social.

Some stuff we work on

Some stuff we’ve made

A broken white font on a black ground presents the text 'Are you having your best outage'

A broken white font on a black ground presents the text 'Lets try to break things better tomorrow'

About us

TireFire?

Tire Fire Heavy Industries began as a parody of high availability posturing within Silicon Valley. Originally, as a bit of performance art, the website was just an error page. The joke being that TireFire is the brainchild of reliability professionals who work for Real Serious Companies with Real Serious Names yet our own internals held together with one can describe only as duct tape and cobwebs.

The cobbler’s children have no shoes, the sysop’s homelab is still running a hand-built 3.X Linux kernel.

The ever present challenges of reliability and frustrations of being an operational cost center had inculcated a set of rather bad attitudes in what were already pretty punk rock folks among whom “let it burn” and “can I start drinking yet” are common coping mechanisms.

Amidst the unturn’d green fields of software engineering;

we shovel coal into bird shaped furnaces;

tend to the dumpster fires;

own the tire swing ablaze.

A tire swing blazes amidst an otherwise peaceful evening field

With thanks to Ian Coldwater, it’s a lovely day in the datacenter and you’re a horrible goose.

A goose pulls a switch down an datacenter isle by a dangling cord in the style of Untitled Goose Game

With thanks to Stevil Kinevil of AHTBM,

A black sticker with a broken font reads 'Everything can be fixed with a hammer'

Industries?

“Heavy Industries” is a long standing joke in software going back to l0pht Heavy Industries in the 90s.

It references the industrial capacity of east asian companies that often allowed their forays into consumer markets.

From Wikipedia;

Many East Asian countries rely on heavy industry as key parts of their overall economies. This reliance on heavy industry is typically a matter of government economic policy. Among Japanese and Korean firms with “heavy industry” in their names, many are also manufacturers of aerospace products and defense contractors to their respective countries’ governments such as Japan’s Fuji Heavy Industries and Korea’s Hyundai Rotem, a joint project of Hyundai Heavy Industries and Daewoo Heavy Industries.

Image board

From Faceboook; “The Journey is 1% Finished” is an internal Engineering slogan referencing the idea that software is never “finished”

A yellow sign reads this journey is 1% finished

We have a deep and abiding love for the bold colors and lettering of DEC

the word digital in white lettering on broken maroon boxes

A DEC PDP-11 unit with a cream case prividing a striking contrast to a black front pannel and multicolored off-red switches

A DEC PDP-8F unit with a cream case prividing a striking contrast to a black front pannel with orange and yellow details