Who's on call? - 123dev #69

When the team is aligned the passes are smooth.

I was an SRE in a previous role and bought into the idea of SRE. I read the books and thought the concept was great, but after doing the role for a while and later seeing how Amazon does operations I realize that SRE is just the new ops.

The skills and tools are better and the problems are slightly different, but the process and reporting structure didn’t change. The power dynamics between SRE and application developers is unavoidable so long as the reliability for a system falls on a different team than the creators of that system.

The best way to get good at operations is to have teams where everyone has the same access, responsibilities, and titles. Reliability is discussed in the same meetings as features and design. Pagers are for everyone and tool silos are minimized.

I donated money to efforts and friends in Ukrane and it felt like my contributions were meaningless. They were fairly small donations, but I knew with enough people we could collectively make a big difference.

But then companies and governments got involved with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. I, again, felt like my contributions didn’t matter.

But then I realized governments are micro payments from massive amounts of people. Taxes paid for that funding and collectively—through voting and representation—we all decided where to send the money. The government aid was very different from where I personally sent money, and new platforms and tools make it easier for me to make an impact without requiring the collective will of the government to do what I hope is right.

I’m lucky to have individual power to pay taxes in a state of my choosing and country where I have some say in who represents me.

This article had some of the best tips I’ve read in an article for a while. If you only read one article this week, make it this one.

How is technical debt different from financial debt? Why do we talk about technical debt so differently? This was a good article about how the business thinks about debt.

The first article mentioned graph databases not having a use, and this article talks about a really cool use for them. It’s very industry specific but I know there are similar situations where a graph makes sense.