Slight Reliability

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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

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This week I check in and give an update on work, life, and my attempts at bringing to life SRE practices in the world of non-production environment management.

You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

This episode was sponsored by SquaredUp. SquaredUp combines all your data with awesome dashboards, analytics, health rollup, and notifications, into a unified observability portal. Using a data mesh architecture, SquaredUp is a beautifully simple way to get instant access to the insights that matter, whenever you need them. If you want to know more head over to https://squaredup.com/ to sign up for your free account.

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This week I'm joined by Karanveer Anand, SRE Technical Program Manager at Google to discuss blameless post-mortems. We cover:

🦅 The recent Crowdstrike outage and their public post-mortem
🚑 When do we do a blameless post-mortem?
😕 How do we do a blameless post-mortem?
✅ How do we make sure action items are followed through?
📰 The power of learning from post-mortems created by other teams and orgs

...and much more.

You can find Karanveer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karanveer/

You can find Crowdstrike's preliminary post incident report here: https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/falcon-content-update-preliminary-post-incident-report/

You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

This episode was sponsored by SquaredUp. SquaredUp combines all your data with awesome dashboards, analytics, health rollup, and notifications, into a unified observability portal. Using a data mesh architecture, SquaredUp is a beautifully simple way to get instant access to the insights that matter, whenever you need them. If you want to know more head over to https://squaredup.com/ to sign up for your free account.

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This week Zach Michel from https://middleware.io/ and I discuss the state of OpenTelemetry and what it means to adopt it. We cover:

🌩️ Achieving observability in a SaaS world
🥫 Context propagation - the magic sauce of OTEL
🚪 The telemetry gateway concept and leveraging the OTEL collector
🪵 The state of OpenTelemetry logging
🫂 Making use of the OpenTelemetry community

...and much more.

You can find Zach on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zamichel/

You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/

For a list of ways to interact with the OpenTelemetry community go to:
https://opentelemetry.io/community/

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

This episode was sponsored by SquaredUp. SquaredUp combines all your data with awesome dashboards, analytics, health rollup, and notifications, into a unified observability portal. Using a data mesh architecture, SquaredUp is a beautifully simple way to get instant access to the insights that matter, whenever you need them. If you want to know more head over to https://squaredup.com/ to sign up for your free account.

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In Episode 80 Niall Murphy talked about the need for SREs to be better at articulating the value of our work. In this episode I'm joined by ex-Googler and Engineering Director (SRE) at Culture Amp Artem Yakimenko about how we might achieve this.

We discuss both quantifiable and qualitative approaches including leveraging the untapped data in support tickets, customer sentiment and rankings, the relationship between finance and performance, the link between user design and performance, and so much more.

Books mentioned in the episode:

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People
By Susan Weinschenk
https://www.amazon.com.au/Things-Every-Designer-Needs-People/dp/0321767535

You can find Artem on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/temikus/

You can find the official Slight Reliability podcast website at: https://slightreliability.com/

You can find Stephen at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

This episode was sponsored by SquaredUp. SquaredUp combines all your data with awesome dashboards, analytics, health rollup, and notifications, into a unified observability portal. Using a data mesh architecture, SquaredUp is a beautifully simple way to get instant access to the insights that matter, whenever you need them. If you want to know more head over to https://squaredup.com/ to sign up for your free account.