Hopes and Strategies

Related to a discussion my colleague Betsy and I had the other day, I was led to the following observation: The end state of an SRE team that acquires new work and automates this new work as much as possible is to have only non-automatable (or practically non-automatable) work remaining. What do I mean here? It's a little like the operational analogue of Amdahl's law . From  parallel computing, Amdahl's law is a description of the limits of how much a computation can be sped up, given some description of what proportion of it is not parallelizable. There are a number of underlying reasons for this, of course, and it turns out that it is much less of an effective limit on the benefits of parallelization than it sounds, but it came to mind when I was thinking about SRE teams workstreams the other day. To put it another way, a similar analogue for operations is the observation that the proportion of SRE work for a service which is non-automatable comes, over time, to do...

I am somewhat unusual in having a degree not only in CS & Maths, but also in Poetry Studies. Yet there's more in common between poetry and programming than practitioners from either side usually recognise. For example: I'm wrestling with some problem. I'm not completely sure how to characterise it, or what the solution is. I might have a good first-order guess at how to tackle it, or I might not. Part of the function of writing is to firm up this first-order idea of what  the right way is. I open an editor partially to let my mind run cerebral digits around the edges of the problem. I open it partially for the pleasure of writing, of crafting something that might work, that might be the best I've done yet. While I write, I think precisely and painstakingly about the power of words I use, and the higher-level constructions. There are many consequences to the words and the forms we choose: some obvious, some very much less so. I think hard about how each w...

On-call is broken. It's used to paper over the cracks in systems, instead of as a reliable, reluctantly-used failsafe. The whole way we do it as an industry is just wrong. Perhaps you disagree, but I think I have some pretty compelling evidence that it's true. I also think we can fix it -- or at least give it a good try.