The story of repeat incidents feels a lot like this. They were not the same, they repeated themselves, they contained failure, they contained success, they looked familiar and comfortable, they looked unrecognizable and scary, they held discovery and enlightenment, they brought ambiguity and fear, we had all the right observability, we had nothing before us…

I work at a company called Blameless. We make a platform that Site Reliability teams use to provide structure during Incident Response. In my opinion its biggest advantage is how it supports humans in a transparent and accountable way. It is especially good at techniques that support maintaining Common Ground: organizing knowledge, defining roles, providing state, removing assumptions. Running a learning review for us means that we talk about the story of what happened. We are interested in the…

As part of my job as SRE Advocate, I am responsible for our “Continuous Improvement” and “Applied Resilience Engineering” programs. Those are two very big words for teacher and coach. I love this work and sometimes believe I missed a calling not going into Music Education, although I am drawing heavily from my music background to do it. More so than ever before.

We have been working on Service Level Objectives (SLO) at my work. It isn’t easy. We get into a lot of discussions (arguments?) about why an SLO is not a contractural Service Level Agreement (SLA). Some want to instrument every piece of service functionality and have a big bag of SLI parts to pick from instead of identifying groups of components that can be represented as a binary value of “User is Happy. User is NOT happy.”

Sometime the 1990’s, a music term surfaced to describe a burgeoning style of electronic music. But let’s be clear here, the history of music is thousands of years old, electronic music at all is an infantile genre. But we are humans, and we love to name things, and so “Intelligent Dance Music” came to be.