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This week I'm joined by the wonderful Hanson Ho to discuss the unique challenges and opportunities in making our mobile apps observable! We cover...

📱 The mobile/backend observability divide
✍️ The challenge of distributed tracing on mobile apps
🌏 The entire device runtime environment matters for your app
👤 The quest for user-centric mobile observability
✅ Advice on how to get started with mobile observability

...and much more.

You can find Hanson on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hanson-ho/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bidetofevil.wtf

You can find out more about Embrace at https://embrace.io/

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week on the I'm joined once more by SRE leader Michelle Casey who gives a broad and shallow introduction to resilience engineering. We cover...

🏋️‍♀️ Reliability VS Robustness VS Resilience
🧩 What is a complex system?
🔢 Safety one/safety two
🧠 Mental models
😩 Human error

...and so much more.

Resources from this episode:

Four concepts for resilience (paper) by Dr. David Woods https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276139783_Four_concepts_for_resilience_and_the_implications_for_the_future_of_resilience_engineering

Building and revising adaptive capacity sharing for technical incident response (paper) by Dr Richard Cook and Dr Beth Long https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344259449_Building_and_revising_adaptive_capacity_sharing_for_technical_incident_response_A_case_of_resilience_engineering

Systems Thinking for Incident Analysis (talk) by Laura Nolan from LFI Conf 23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uXGg3g2yps

How Complex Systems Fail (website) by Dr. Richard Cook https://how.complexsystems.fail/

A Tale of Two Safeties (book) by Erik Hollnagel https://erikhollnagel.com/A Tale of Two Safeties.pdf

From Safety One to Safety Two (book) by Erik Hollnagel https://www.england.nhs.uk/signuptosafety/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2015/10/safety-1-safety-2-whte-papr.pdf

Resilience: It's not you, it's the System (talk) by Dr Carl Horsley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugC3GTKt23U

Above the line / Below the line (paper) by Dr Richard Cook (not original link) https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Above-the-Line-Below-the-Line-framework-adapted-with-permission-Cook-Woods-2016_fig3_333091997

How Your Systems Keep Running Day After Day (talk) by John Allspaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA5U85LSk0M

Behind Human Error (book) https://www.amazon.com.au/Behind-Human-Error-David-Woods/dp/0754678342

The Field Guide to Human Error Investigations (book) by Sydney Dekker https://www.humanfactors.lth.se/fileadmin/lusa/Sidney_Dekker/books/DekkersFieldGuide.pdf

The Howie Guide (paper) by Dr Laura Maguire, Nora Jones and Vanessa Granda https://howie-guide.pagerduty.com/

Resilience Engineering: Where do I start? (website) by Lorin Hochstein https://www.resilience-engineering-association.org/resources/where-do-i-start/

The STELLA report (paper) https://snafucatchers.github.io/

DORA Communtiy Discussion - Resilience Engineering (discussion) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3cEJ7njJbc

This Is Fine! (podcast) by Colette Alexander and Clint Byrum https://www.thisisfinepod.com/the-pod

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This week on the 100th episode I'm joined by DevOps and Resilience Engineering legend John Allspaw to talk about learning (especially from incidents). We discuss...

📒 Classroom VS situated learning
🤝 The myth of the perfect handover
ITIL as a coping strategy to try and make sense of the organic, wild, and messy
🥕 How you cannot incentivise to avoid incidents (it doesn't work that way)
❤️‍🩹 You can't understand how something is broken unless you know how it's supposed to work in the first place

...and much more.

Resources from this episode:

Pre-Accident Investigations by Todd Conklin https://www.amazon.com.au/Pre-Accident-Investigations-Introduction-Organizational-Safety/dp/1409447820
Working at the Center of the Cyclone by Dr. Richard Cook https://itrevolution.com/articles/center-of-the-cyclone-dr-richard-cook/

To join the Resilience in Software Foundation head over to: https://resilienceinsoftware.org/

You can find John on:

Website: https://www.kitchensoap.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jallspaw/

You can find Adapative Capacity Labs here: https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week I'm joined by SRE leader Trent Hornibrook who shares a story about how he improved on-call early in his career, and then we explore the broader theme of focusing on the things that matter in observability, incident response, on-call, and beyond. We discuss...

🔌 Empowering engineers to implement change in your org
🧑‍🍼 Focusing on what matters (customer & business > technology)
👀 Not just adding more monitoring as the output of each PIR
😎 How autonomy can lead to accountability
🌳 How to influence change in an organisation

...and much more.

You can find Trent on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trenthornibrook/

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week I'm joined by SRE leader Andrew Hatch from Cisco ThousandEyes to talk about a dirty word in the resilience community... root cause. In this excellent conversation we explore...

🌌 Is the root cause of every incident the big bang?
🦖 How the value of root cause degrades as complexity increases
🫣 That if the culture is not blameless, people will hide things
🌳 Alternative approaches to root cause analysis such as branching timelines
🙋 Getting someone without skin in the game to facilitate your blameless post-mortems

...and much more.

You can find Andrew on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hatchman76/

Check out Andrew's SREcon21 talk 'Learning from Complex Systems' which covers many of the topics introduced in this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pKGW61Ryvo

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week I'm joined by David Dick from 2 Steps to (finally!) discuss synthetic monitoring. We cover...

🤖 What is synthetic monitoring?
🦾 What are the benefits and drawbacks to using it?
☢️ Non-web based synthetics (the tough stuff)
🍹 Combining RUM and synthetics
🫢 Does synthetics need an OTEL-like framework?

...and much more.

You can find David on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-dick/

You can find more about 2 Steps at https://2steps.io/#

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week I'm joined by Cin7 Engineering Director Milan Brown to unpack the challenges of technology management and leadership. We discuss...

✖️ Theory X vs Theory Y management
🗣️ Intention based leadership and communication
🏢 Conditions in an org for people to thrive
😵‍💫 How do you learn to manage and lead?
🫤 Managing people when you're not an expert in what they do

...and much more.

Resources mentioned during the episode:

Turn The Ship Around! (book): https://davidmarquet.com/turn-the-ship-around-book/
Agile Conversations (book): https://itrevolution.com/product/agile-conversations/
Drive (book): https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/
Radical Candor (book): https://www.radicalcandor.com/the-book/
The Team Canvas (technique): https://theteamcanvas.com/
The Enginer/Manager Pendulum (article): https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/
Retromat (tool for running retrospectives): https://retromat.org/

You can find Milan on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milan-brown/

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week Leon Adato and I break down the state of applying for roles in tech. We cover...

📝 What a resume or CV is and is not
🤝 Leveraging your connections rather than relying on applying cold
🪄 How most job descriptions are works of fiction
🦾 White-fonting to game AI resume assessment
🧪 Experimental ways we could recruit

...and our pitch for Kubernetes the Rock Opera (and much more)

You can find Leon's job postings weekly on his website:
https://www.adatosystems.com/category/joblistings/

You can find Leon on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonadato/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leonadato.bsky.social

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week Priyam Kumar shares his story of moving from a massive organisation to a startup and the challenges and growth that came from that. We discuss...

🪖 War stories and examples of production incidents
🩹 The "hacks" we build to keep things running (and how maybe that's just normal)
😎 Keeping it simple... YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It!)
🧯 The perils of getting stuck in reactive mode
📖 Areas of of learning if you want to get into SRE

...and much much more.

You can find Priyam on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/priyam-kumar/

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week Michelle Casey shares her insights as a 'head of' engineering manager in the SRE context. This was one of my favourite conversations on the podcast so far. We cover topics such as...

🤷🏽 Why move into leadership?
👁️ Learning from other leaders
💎 What is unique about SRE leadership?
👑 Women in engineering leadership

...and we go through some feedback I got as a leader recently.

Resources that Michelle mentions during the episode:

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (book): https://www.tablegroup.com/topics-and-resources/teamwork-5-dysfunctions/
The Phoenix Project (novel): https://itrevolution.com/product/the-phoenix-project/
The Unicorn Project (novel): https://itrevolution.com/product/the-unicorn-project/
How Complex Systems Fail (website): https://how.complexsystems.fail/
How Your Systems Keep Running Day After Day (talk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA5U85LSk0M
The Curse of the Systems Thinker (article): https://blog.relyabilit.ie/the-curse-of-systems-thinkers/
Confessions of an SRE Manager (talk): https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon23americas/presentation/hatch
Gender Decoder (website): https://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/

You can find Michelle on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-casey-00b39837/
Steve Licks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tailsofstevielicks?igsh=MWFhenVzdzh6Zmtudw%3D%3D

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre