I’m a big fan of Fantasy and SciFi novels, ever since I first picked up The Hobbit before freshmen year in high school. I love how magic seems to well up within folks, when things seem most dire that people can be their best selves. Unknown strength or skill appears in the moment to solve the crisis at hand, despite… Read more →
Note: This post originally appeared on the Learning from Incidents site, cross posted here for my own preservation of thoughts. You can find the original post at https://www.learningfromincidents.io/blog/patience-in-implementing-effective-incident-reviews. Pressure in just getting an incident review “done” As we struggle to understand how things go wrong, to learn from incidents, and to prepare ourselves for future surprises, the hurried rush to… Read more →
Deploying code on a Friday is a hot button topic that pops up in tech every few months, setting twitter and the like ablaze with passionate discourse in both directions. “It’s too risky to on call folks”, “no, it’s perfectly fine if you build your systems right” and so on. This is me adding fuel to that fire. Some first… Read more →
The following is the current version of a section in my book on interviewing for technical roles. I’m trying to help out with any advice I can while I’m putting all of this together. As part of that, I’m looking for constructive criticism and feedback. My experiences as an engineer are also not universal and so my own biases will creep… Read more →
Coming back from SREcon 19 Americas in Brooklyn (catch up with Tanya Reilly’s conf report) and Chaos Community Day 19 in Manhattan (Nora Jones’ Chaos Engineering Traps), Resilience Engineering has had my full attention lately. I’m thoroughly encouraged to see so many folks interested in it and speakers from many different companies contributing their shared experiences to a field that… Read more →
This post on error budgets should be considered fluid, ideas worked in and out as any good beliefs should. My experiences with error budgets are not universal and should not be assumed as decrying anyone who has had success using them. I strongly welcome thoughtful, critical feedback and assume best intent from anyone who disagrees. I’m not a fan of… Read more →
I want to help folks. That’s one of my driving forces in software development. I don’t want to simply build for the sake of building, my code nothing more than a digital ouroboros. There needs to be a sense of purpose to what I’m investing my time in, something greater than “hey, look at this thing I made, aren’t I… Read more →
The following is the current version of a section in my book on interviewing for technical roles. I’m trying to help out with any advice I can while I’m putting all of this together. As part of that, I’m looking for constructive criticism and feedback. My experiences as an engineer are also not universal and so my own biases will creep… Read more →
I recently had a chance to review Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It, which takes a critical look at several examples of catastrophic failure in many differing areas and applies Perrow’s theories of Normal Accidents in order to address these systemic problems we face regularly. A lot of the background in human factors I’m… Read more →
Resumes offer a view into an engineer’s professional and educational life, but can only skim the surface. Condensing all of your hard work into a page or two can’t explain everything. How will you handle a roadmap that suddenly upends half way through the quarter? Can you be a valuable asset in a crisis to help mitigate an ongoing outage?… Read more →