I’ve been playing with an idea based mostly on anecdotal evidence: At some point, the external dependencies which our systems rely on become so tightly coupled, large, and fundamental that should those foundations inevitably fail, that blame can actually go down in response to an incident. A blanket statement applicable to any system feels egregious, but I’m confident enough to… Read more →
So I bombed an incident review this week. More specifically, the facilitating. I’ve run post mortems/retrospectives/PIRs, whatever you want to call them, for over a decade. Just felt my arthritis kick in a bit as I typed that. It’s hard to quantify, to even qualify, subtle nuances and questions I’ve developed as handy go-to’s to get folks to speak up… Read more →
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 →
I recently woke up one morning and, bleary eyed, grabbed a cold bottle of iced tea from the fridge. It’s my small allowance of caffeine intake for the day and I was glad for the foresight to pop it in the night before to chill. That’s one of those handy misconceptions we tend to use, thinking of refrigerators as “adding… Read more →
How many maybes do you need until you get someone to be empathetic to a situation? It’s no surprise when we discuss failure modes of organizations, typically from the outside, that we can spot the smaller failure modes. We’re looking backwards, the benefit of hindsight in full display and with all the time we need. We’re not seeing the hurdles… Read more →
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 useful task in a software engineer’s career, notably when looking towards a promotion, is outlining what steps in a career look like. How can you be ready to grow into a new position or take a bigger lead in work if you’re unsure what that means? Similarly, when guiding folks who are up and coming, what better way than… Read more →
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 →
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 →
Blame awareness only works if you work towards blame awareness with all incidents, not just the ones that affect yo Read more →