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To begin 2023 I share the books I read last year in my quest to be a better SRE.

Here is a list of all the books mentioned during the episode:

• The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
• Site Reliability Engineering (by Google) https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/
• Sooner, Safer, Happier by Jonathon Smart https://soonersaferhappier.com/book/
• The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Way-Second-Management-Manufacturer/dp/1260468518
• Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried https://www.amazon.com/Remote-Office-Required-Jason-Fried/dp/0091954673
• Driving Digital Strategy by Sunil Gupta https://www.amazon.com/Driving-Digital-Strategy-Reimagining-Business/dp/163369268X
• Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais https://teamtopologies.com/book
• Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339
• The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-managers-path/9781491973882/
• Staff Engineer by Will Larson https://staffeng.com/book
• Getting Things Done by David Allen https://gettingthingsdone.com/books/
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555
• Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O’Reilly https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/lean-enterprise/9781491946527/

You can find me on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre

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This week Henrik Rexed and Stephen Townshend discuss their New Year's resolutions for observability. They cover OpenTelemetry and a unified query language, continuous profiling, raw data analysis, instrumenting code, using distributed tracing as part of testing, and much more.

Some of the tools or resources mentioned during the episode include:
https://tracetest.io/ (distributed tracing for testing)
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opamp-go (OTEL orchestration)
https://ebpf.io/ (for continuous profiling)

You can find Henrik on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hrexed/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/Hrexed
You can find the Is It Observable? series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IsitObservable
And the Perfbytes Podcast on most podcast platforms: https://www.perfbytes.com/p/perfbytes.html

You can find me on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre

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This week we talk to Steve Gill and Gwen Berry from IAG to discuss their experiences forming an SRE incubator team (starting SRE from scratch in a large enterprise). We discuss on-call, SLOs, single pane of glass, pivoting, chaos engineering, and much more.

You can find Steve on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevegill239/
You can find Gwen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gwen-berry-56324418b/

You can find me on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre

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This week I share the observations I made at AWS re:Invent relating to SRE work including the lack of SREs at the event, data warehouses for observability data, the use of topologies to understand complexity, FinOps, serverless, making sense of enormous amounts of data... and more.

You can find me on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre

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This week I was at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, so I took the opportunity to walk around the expo asking observability vendors what their perspective or definition of "observability" was (and reflected on that).

You can find me on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre

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In this episode I explore the different kinds of SRE out there and the different needs they fill in the industry, and discuss some ethically dubious practices around hiring SREs.

You can find me on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre

Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!).

Intro:
https://uppbeat.io/t/sensho/good-times
License code: QBXDSEGNJZY9DDIC

Outro:
https://uppbeat.io/t/mountaineer/voyager
License code: 5C0VMTUOULFSRSTM

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In this episode I chat to Kyle Forster and Shea Stewart from RunWhen about the concept of "social reliability engineering" and how it could help SREs from organisations all over the world create an ecosystem of sharing and collaboration.

You can find Kyle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyforster/
You can find Shea on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheastewart/
To find out more about RunWhen: https://www.runwhen.com/
And an example of the "street map view" of a tech stack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOvH9lcgCXg

You can find me on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre

Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!).

Intro:
https://uppbeat.io/t/sensho/good-times
License code: QBXDSEGNJZY9DDIC

Outro:
https://uppbeat.io/t/mountaineer/voyager
License code: 5C0VMTUOULFSRSTM

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In this episode I reflect back on the very first episode of Slight Reliability "What the heck is SRE anyway?" and see if my perspective has changed since then. I also tackle the confusion about what SRE is and is not.

Shout out to Sebastian Vietz (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastianvietz/) for his "Service Reliability Engineering" terminology and Richard Benwell (https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-benwell-ab887b11/) for highlighting the way SRE offers a different value proposition depending on the scale of the services in question.

You can find me on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre

Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!).

Intro:
https://uppbeat.io/t/sensho/good-times
License code: QBXDSEGNJZY9DDIC

Outro:
https://uppbeat.io/t/mountaineer/voyager
License code: 5C0VMTUOULFSRSTM

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In this episode I announce my new role as Developer Advocate (SRE) at SquaredUp, and what this means for the Slight Reliability podcast.

You can find me on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre

Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!).

Intro:
https://uppbeat.io/t/sensho/good-times
License code: QBXDSEGNJZY9DDIC

Outro:
https://uppbeat.io/t/mountaineer/voyager
License code: 5C0VMTUOULFSRSTM

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In this episode I give a summary of the book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manual Pais (https://teamtopologies.com/book) and how this relates to implementing SRE practices.

(POINT OF CORRECTION: One of the authors is "Matthew" Skelton, not "Michael")

You can find me on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre

Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!).

Intro:
https://uppbeat.io/t/sensho/good-times
License code: QBXDSEGNJZY9DDIC

Outro:
https://uppbeat.io/t/mountaineer/voyager
License code: 5C0VMTUOULFSRSTM