Resilience in Action

Brian Scott is the 1st Technology Evangelist/Engineering Advocate at the Walt Disney Company. In his first 7 years with the company, he served as Staff SRE and Manager of Systems Reliability Engineering building teams in Disney Studios, Lucasfilm, Streaming, 21st Century Fox, and Disney Imagineering, supporting Online Properties at scale across the Enterprise. He has been in DevOps and Web Development for over 20 years working at such companies as MySpace, RazorGator, and many other startups before joining Disney focusing on Public Cloud Governance and Automation, DevOps & SRE. Brian is a contributor to Open Source, a father & huge Go fan! His personal blog is https://brianlscott.com. 

John Allspaw has worked in software systems engineering and operations for over twenty years in many different environments. He authored the books The Art of Capacity Planning and Web Operations, as well as the forward to The DevOps Handbook. John’s 2009 Velocity talk with Paul Hammond, 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation, is credited for helping start the DevOps movement. John served as CTO at Etsy and holds an MSc in Human Factors and Systems Safety from Lund University.

Listen to the conversation between Kurt Andersen and Betsy Beyer about her experience co-authoring Google's SRE Handbook and advice on career growth as a technical writer.

What can software engineers learn from post-incident reviews that physicians do in the emergency room? In our ninth episode, Christina, member of the Blameless strategy team, guest-hosts the podcast to interview both Kurt Andersen and Al'ai Alvarez, MD (@alvarezzzy). 

Dr. Alvarez is an assistant clinical professor of Emergency Medicine at Stanford. Clinically, he’s an emergency physician. He has led residents as an associate residency program director, and recently became their department’s Director of Well-Being. His work focuses on physician well-being and humanizing physicians in the context of high performance teams. 

The trio talk about fostering blameless cultures in their domain, dealing with self blame, and what leaders can do to make learning from bad outcomes safe and fruitful. Read the organized transcript below. 

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Resilience in Action is a podcast about all things resilience, from SRE to software engineering, to how it affects our personal lives and more. This podcast is hosted by Kurt Andersen. Kurt is a practitioner and an active thought leader in the SRE community. He speaks at major DevOps & SRE conferences and publishes his work through O'Reilly in quintessential SRE books such as Seeking ARE, What is SRE?, and 97 Things Every SRE Should Know.

Resilience in Action is a podcast about all things resilience, from SRE to software engineering, to how it affects our personal lives, and more. Resilience in Action is hosted by Kurt Andersen. Kurt is a practitioner and an active thought leader in the SRE community. He speaks at major DevOps & SRE conferences and publishes his work through O'Reilly in quintessential SRE books such as Seeking SRE, What is SRE?, and 97 Things Every SRE Should Know.

In our eighth episode, Kurt chats with Vanessa Yiu, Head of Enterprise Architecture at Goldman Sachs. Vanessa shares her perspective on enterprise architecture, experience in operating enterprise-scale platforms, chairing the first global SRECon, advocating for women in STEM, and how enterprises can embark on the journey of making reliability more important.

See the full transcript of their conversation below, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Resilience in Action is a podcast about all things resilience, from SRE to software engineering, to how it affects our personal lives, and more. Resilience in Action is hosted by Kurt Andersen. Kurt is a practitioner and an active thought leader in the SRE community. He speaks at major DevOps & SRE conferences and publishes his work through O'Reilly in quintessential SRE books such as Seeking SRE, What is SRE?, and 97 Things Every SRE Should Know.

Before joining Blameless, Kurt was a Sr. Staff SRE at LinkedIn, implementing SLOs (reliability metrics) at scale across the board for thousands of  independently deployable services. Kurt is a member of the USENIX Board of Directors and part of the steering committee for the world-wide SREcon conferences.

In our seventh episode, Kurt chats with Tony Hansmann, Former Global CTO at Pivotal Software, Inc., about the joys and pains of being a consultant, how teams view digital transformation, how Tony is working towards killing ops, and more.