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This week Stephen chats with Martin Thwaites from Honeycomb about how developers can leverage observability to understand what they're building better, solve bugs quicker, and have more time for coding. They also discuss OpenTelemetry (the protocol and semantic conventions), manual versus automatic instrumentation, and how keeping every span of trace data is irresponsible.

You can find Martin at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-thwaites-ab445120/
X: https://twitter.com/MartinDotNet

And Honeycomb at https://www.honeycomb.io/

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/
X: 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

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Observability is a necessary adaptation to make sense of software systems in the Digital Age, but how can we unlock its power for non-engineer stakeholders (such as executives, product owners, etc)? Perhaps we need a layer of abstraction sitting on top of our detailed observability to get the most out of it.

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

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This week Stephen chats with former-Google SRE Matt Brown about being on-call. They cover how to up-lift junior engineers so they can be on-call, what a fair on-call schedule looks like, run-books, and much more.

As you heard, Matt believes flexibility is key to a healthy on-call rotation. Matt is exploring ideas for improvements to existing tooling and products in this space and would love to hear from as many listeners as possible with feedback on what they find useful or frustrating with the existing tools they use to support on-call in their teams. You can reach him at [email protected] or schedule a chat via https://zcal.co/mattb/oncall, please don't be shy!

You can also find Matt at:

Website: https://www.mattb.nz/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbrown/
Mastodon: https://mastodon.nz/@mattb
Twitter: https://twitter.com/xleem

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

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The internet is full of people who want to tell you about SRE, DevOps, and Platform Engineering and how different and similar they are... and will give you the impression that these things compete with each other. But do they? And is it a helpful question to ask in the first place?

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

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In this episode Amin Astaneh from Certo Modo discusses his experience undertaking an SRE transformation over several years.

Stephen and Amin cover a lot of ground including making ops work visible, measuring toil, the power of calculating the $ value of work, getting developers on-call, the embedded model for SRE, SLOs, culture change, and a whole lot more.

You can find Amin on his company website https://certomodo.io, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aminastaneh/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/aastaneh

The books Amin mentions are...

The Practice of Cloud System Administration: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/practice-of-cloud/9780133478549/

The Phoenix Project: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-phoenix-project/9781457191350/

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
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

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In this episode Stephen Townshend and Sonja Chevre from Tyk discuss making APIs observable, and some anti-patterns to avoid. They cover GraphQL, OpenTelemetry and semantic conventions, correlation IDs, observability pipelines, and much more.

You can find Sonja on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonjachevre/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/SonjaChevre

You can listen to Sonja's KubeCon talk here: https://youtu.be/IkEUJjRBCbo

You can find Tyk's open source gateway here: https://github.com/TykTechnologies/tyk

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
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

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In this episode Stephen Townshend and Harinder Seera explore how to monitor and manage the cost of cloud. They discuss FinOps as a cultural practice, anti-patterns for implementing in the cloud, keeping cost down through resources, pricing, and architecture... and much more.

You can find Harinder on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harinderseera/

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
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

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In this episode Stephen shares his experiences traveling overseas to the UK and Singapore AWS Summit, SREcon APAC, and the internal SquaredUp conference "SqUpCon".

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

You can find Slight Reliability artwork on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

You can find Stephen at:

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

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A quick update on Stephen's whereabouts and when the next episode will be released.

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In this episode Stephen discusses the role of dashboards within the context of the Digital Era. What are they *not* appropriate for? What can they help with? What kinds of things are suitable to present?

If you want to get involved in the SquaredUp dashboard competition head along to: https://squaredup.com/blog/dashboard-competition/ (everyone who submits an entry gets a t-shirt, you can also win Star Wars Lego, get video interviewed by me, and have the story of your dashboard presented both as a blog and on our Dashboard Gallery).

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

You can find Slight Reliability artwork on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/

You can find Stephen at:

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/