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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

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This week Adam and I get philosophical about what constitutes maturity in the field of observability. We tackle questions such as...

💸 Does your org treat observability as a cost centre or a value add?
🔥 Are you using observability reactively to solve problems? Or proactively to build better products and services?
👤 Is your observability connected to your users and business in a meaningful way?
🌐 Is monitoring the social media sentiment of your product part of observability?

...and much more.

You can find Adam at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-toth-innovateq/
InnovaTeQ website: https://innovateq.io/

I mentioned the 'This Is Fine!' podcast about resilience engineering. Find it on Spotify or at https://www.thisisfinepod.com/

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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In this episode I explore the challenges of achieving unified observability when integrating with SaaS products and services. I cover:

🌊 The new wave of mega-complex SaaS
⚗️ Challenges integrating SaaS with our observability pipelines
👩‍🦯 How the lack of SaaS autonomy limits the effectiveness of OpenTelemetry
💰 Paying twice to ingest, store, and search telemetry
📈 Monitoring and predicting SaaS observability costs

...and much more.

Shout out to Mark Chiavaroli (and apologies for mispronouncing your surname multiple times), Damian Sharrock, and Reece Hewitt for bouncing ideas on this topic.

The 'Is it observable?' series can be found here: https://isitobservable.io/
...and you can find Henrik on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hrexed/

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