A sign in white saying "Mind the Gap"

Job Switching and Titles

Job titles aren’t what they once were. Of course, they’ve never been what they once were, either. We like to put order to the chaos, imagining some consistent through line in tech, but I’ve seen few companies maintain their engineering ladder, at least for ICs, for any extended period of time. They tend to be somewhat volatile over the lifetime… Read more →

Pink sticky notes

Layoffs Reduce Safety

I firmly believe as an industry we are in a fragile state. That statement certainly carries vague, fortune teller vibes (how do you prove that, or disprove it, for that matter?). It may be akin to saying the end of the world is here, just you wait – except we see failures in our system all the time, and so… Read more →

A looming sandy brick wall over water

SREcon24 Americas Recap

I wasn’t originally planning on a write up of SREcon24 Americas, but some ideas bubbled in my head, along with some themes, and there were a ton of solid talks (the speaker line up was wall-to-wall heavy hitters). I’m also curious how I’ll feel about my talk in the future and wanted to capture that to look back on. And… Read more →

A set of fried capacitors

Justifying Resilience Work

How do we justify the need to make our organizations more resilient? Quick Primer: in this context, a shorthand for resilience is adapting to unexpected changes in an environment in an attempt to return to stability. It’s not robustness, like an automatic fail-over of a system without human intervention (removing a server from a pool behind a load balancer for… Read more →

blue lightsaber - https://flickr.com/photos/remmac/6926811817

On Lightsabers and Resilience

Main Takeaway: Adaptability can only come from expertise, and expertise is developed only through experience. Quite often, that’s failure and even the expectation of failure (gamedays, chaos engineering experiments, architecture reviews, etc.). Also, lightsabers are cool. I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to write about lightsabers. During my lunch breaks I’ve been diving into some Tested.com videos, in particular… Read more →

Chameleon on a leaf with green and red tones https://flickr.com/photos/michaels_bilder_aus_aller_welt/10760876543

The Invisible Success of Near Misses

We often talk about blame aware culture. Your teams are continuously working towards building a system where, among many goals, a safe and reliable system is available. When we’re surprised, incidents happen. As we’re working towards safety, and by definition these incidents are surprises, shaming folks for failure is counterproductive and instead we should celebrate the opportunity to learn more.… Read more →