Resilience in Action: Recent Episodes
Kurt Andersen, Blameless
SRE Architect Kurt Andersen interviews industry thought leaders about all things resilience, from their experiences on the job, to their trickiest incidents, to crafting and maintaining SLOs, to how resilience engineering plays a part in their personal lives.
John Allspaw has worked in software systems engineering and operations for over twenty years in many different environments. He authored the books The Art of Capacity Planning and Web Operations, as well as the forward to The DevOps Handbook. John’s 2009 Velocity talk with Paul Hammond, 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation, is credited for helping start the DevOps movement. John served as CTO at Etsy and holds an MSc in Human Factors and Systems Safety from Lund University.
Listen to the conversation between Kurt Andersen and Betsy Beyer about her experience co-authoring Google's SRE Handbook and advice on career growth as a technical writer.
What can software engineers learn from post-incident reviews that physicians do in the emergency room? In our ninth episode, Christina, member of the Blameless strategy team, guest-hosts the podcast to interview both Kurt Andersen and Al'ai Alvarez, MD (@alvarezzzy).
Dr. Alvarez is an assistant clinical professor of Emergency Medicine at Stanford. Clinically, he’s an emergency physician. He has led residents as an associate residency program director, and recently became their department’s Director of Well-Being. His work focuses on physician well-being and humanizing physicians in the context of high performance teams.
The trio talk about fostering blameless cultures in their domain, dealing with self blame, and what leaders can do to make learning from bad outcomes safe and fruitful. Read the organized transcript below.
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Resilience in Action is a podcast about all things resilience, from SRE to software engineering, to how it affects our personal lives and more. This podcast is hosted by Kurt Andersen. Kurt is a practitioner and an active thought leader in the SRE community. He speaks at major DevOps & SRE conferences and publishes his work through O'Reilly in quintessential SRE books such as Seeking ARE, What is SRE?, and 97 Things Every SRE Should Know.
Resilience in Action is a podcast about all things resilience, from SRE to software engineering, to how it affects our personal lives, and more. Resilience in Action is hosted by Kurt Andersen. Kurt is a practitioner and an active thought leader in the SRE community. He speaks at major DevOps & SRE conferences and publishes his work through O'Reilly in quintessential SRE books such as Seeking SRE, What is SRE?, and 97 Things Every SRE Should Know.
In our eighth episode, Kurt chats with Vanessa Yiu, Head of Enterprise Architecture at Goldman Sachs. Vanessa shares her perspective on enterprise architecture, experience in operating enterprise-scale platforms, chairing the first global SRECon, advocating for women in STEM, and how enterprises can embark on the journey of making reliability more important.
See the full transcript of their conversation below, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Resilience in Action is a podcast about all things resilience, from SRE to software engineering, to how it affects our personal lives, and more. Resilience in Action is hosted by Kurt Andersen. Kurt is a practitioner and an active thought leader in the SRE community. He speaks at major DevOps & SRE conferences and publishes his work through O'Reilly in quintessential SRE books such as Seeking SRE, What is SRE?, and 97 Things Every SRE Should Know.
Before joining Blameless, Kurt was a Sr. Staff SRE at LinkedIn, implementing SLOs (reliability metrics) at scale across the board for thousands of independently deployable services. Kurt is a member of the USENIX Board of Directors and part of the steering committee for the world-wide SREcon conferences.
In our seventh episode, Kurt chats with Tony Hansmann, Former Global CTO at Pivotal Software, Inc., about the joys and pains of being a consultant, how teams view digital transformation, how Tony is working towards killing ops, and more.
Resilience in Action is a podcast about all things resilience, from SRE to software engineering, to how it affects our personal lives, and more. Resilience in Action is hosted by Kurt Andersen. Kurt is a practitioner and an active thought leader in the SRE community. He speaks at major DevOps & SRE conferences and publishes his work through O'Reilly in quintessential SRE books such as Seeking SRE, What is SRE?, and 97 Things Every SRE Should Know.
Before joining Blameless, Kurt was a Sr. Staff SRE at LinkedIn, implementing SLOs (reliability metrics) at scale across the board for thousands of independently deployable services. Kurt is a member of the USENIX Board of Directors and part of the steering committee for the world-wide SREcon conferences.
In our sixth episode, Kurt chats with Todd Underwood, ML SRE Lead and PIT Site Lead at Google, about his work as an SRE, the challenges of implementing SLOs for traditional interactive online services, ML-based services and how to think of SLOs for them, and more.
Resilience in Action is a podcast about all things resilience, from SRE to software engineering, to how it affects our personal lives, and more. Resilience in Action is hosted by Blameless Staff SRE Amy Tobey. Amy has been an SRE and DevOps practitioner since before those names existed. She cares deeply about her community of SREs and wants to take what she’s learned over the 20+ years of her career to help others.
In our third episode, Amy chats with Tammy Bryant, Principal SRE at Gremlin, skateboarder, and horror movie lover and Eric Roberts, Sr. Manager SRE at Under Armour, performer/writer/recorder of music, and coffee aficionado.
Resilience in Action is a podcast about all things resilience, from SRE to software engineering, to how it affects our personal lives, and more. Resilience in Action is hosted by Blameless Staff SRE Amy Tobey. Amy has been an SRE and DevOps practitioner since before those names existed. She cares deeply about her community of SREs and wants to take what she’s learned over the 20+ years of her career to help others.
In our third episode, Amy chats with Craig Sebenik, SRE at Aurora and co-author of “What is SRE?” and “Salt Essentials.” He has a degree from Le Cordon Bleu (Sydney, Australia), a Master's in Italian Cuisine (Apcius in Florene, Italy), and a Master's in Gastronomy (University of Rheims, France). His greatest passion is teaching what he has learned from adventures in SRE and cooking.
Resilience in Action is a podcast about all things resilience, from SRE to software engineering, to how it affects our personal lives, and more. Resilience in Action is hosted by Blameless Staff SRE Amy Tobey. Amy has been an SRE and DevOps practitioner since before those names existed. She cares deeply about her community of SREs and wants to take what she’s learned over the 20+ years of her career to help others.
In our third episode, Amy chats with Sidney Miller, Talent Acquisition Lead at Packet and Inclusion Strategist for those that can not have a voice.
Resilience in Action is a podcast about all things resilience, from SRE to software engineering, to how it affects our personal lives, and more. Resilience in Action is hosted by Blameless Staff SRE Amy Tobey. Amy has been an SRE and DevOps practitioner since before those names existed. She cares deeply about her community of SREs and wants to take what she’s learned over the 20+ years of her career to help others.
In our second episode, Amy chats with Tim Banks, a technical account manager at Mission who has held the title of database engineer, DevOps engineer, SRE, American National and Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion, and professional chef during his career. In the podcast, Amy and Tim discuss:
- The importance of adaptability and how that manifests in the roles of chef, martial artist, and engineer
- How ego can cause teams to pivot too slowly
- What organizations can do right now to help with scaling in the face of uncertainty
Resilience in Action is a podcast about all things resilience, from SRE to software engineering, to how it affects our personal lives, and more. Resilience in Action is hosted by Blameless Staff SRE Amy Tobey. Amy has been an SRE and DevOps practitioner since before those names existed. She cares deeply about her community of SREs and wants to take what she’s learned over the 20+ years of her career to help others.
In our very first episode, Amy chats with Netflix software engineer Lorin Hochstein. Lorin is uniquely focused on deep incident analysis and narratives, and was drawn into the storytelling approach due to his fascination with how complex systems fail or behave in unexpected ways.
He realized that the valuable data from Netflix's complex systems was being under-utilized due to shallow post-incident retrospectives and lack of reporting on non-streaming incidents. To combat this, Lorin pioneered the “Oops” write-ups, fostering continuous learning within the organization and creating a deeper level of psychological safety by focusing on the individual incident participant’s narrative of what happened.