On OKRs

[A repost for reference, since the original was removed as part of house-cleaning elsewhere] I'm solidly in favour of a planning architecture of some kind for any team-size collection of people greater than about 5. (Hell, arguably above 2, but let’s keep overheads down.) I’ve had…

Reflections on SREcon EMEA 2022

[Note to the reader: chairs have an obvious obligation to remain as neutral as possible, which I take very seriously. If I mention specific speakers or talks below, it is definitely not to the exclusion of others.] Though I’ve been involved with SREcon EMEA many times before, this time…

Waste versus slack in production engineering

“The waste remains, The waste remains and kills” – Missing Dates, William Empson Economics teaches us that one person’s income is another person’s expenditure. But we don’t think like that when we think of waste. Instead, our usual intuition for waste is it's something expended that…

What SRE could be

Today, I believe we cannot successfully answer several key questions about SRE. Let's start with the most important one: how can we understand what reliability customers want and need?…

The Curse of Systems Thinkers (Part 1)

Somewhere between 15 and 20 years ago, I worked for a company. It was a very prestigious company, and it was a glorious and frustrating time. The company did amazing things. Literally unbelievable achievements - from my point of view anyway. But this was coupled with levels of chaos that…

SRE Practitioner Interview Series

A quick moment for some self-promotion - I very much enjoyed this conversation with Suresh GP.  The brief being pretty broad, I had an unusual amount of time to go into details, which I always appreciate. This helped me to deal with my imposter syndrome about being interviewed under the…

What SRE is not

We used to have a difficulty in our community - thankfully less prevalent now - with rootless questions of identity. Of course, it's not wrong to ask who we are, what we're here for, and what should we be doing: every profession benefits from regular reflection.…