Belated Happy New Year to my fellow SRE fans
👋 Hey friend, Ash here coming to you loud and clear in 2022. Doesn’t that sound strange to say? 20-22. Wow.
First of all, I would like to welcome a whole bunch of new subscribers. Over the holiday period, my small-yet-treasured subscriber base more than doubled. Thank you 🙏🏼 for your vote of confidence. And thank you Lex Neva for contributing to this.
Now, I will need to apologise because I am still coming out of a work mode that comes onto me like clockwork every November/December. For some time now, I’ve been running digital transformation at a healthcare org. A kind of break (but with decent pay) from pure-tech work that began to burn me out around 2016.
The challenge around Nov/Dec with this role is that a lot of our highly bespoke technology providers’ engineers go on mental vacations. No joke.
Downtime of >4 hours during business hours for a legally-mandated application service? Normal. Speed degradation of >100%? A-OK. So for the last 2 months, my days (and often nights) are filled writing non-stop emails and heavily toned phone calls about systems not meeting SLAs. Every. Year. Without fail.
So please excuse me while I reset my brain back into writing about delightful things like SRE and away from trying to keep our professional workforce happy and not quitting because of technology issues affecting their workflows.
Poor technology performance has been listed in several exit interviews as a key reason why some of our professional staff quit. I cannot make this up.
In the meantime, please check out some of my greatest latest hits:
(yes, this newsletter has an SRE-specific theme for the moment, but might shift to a more general technical team and professional development angle in the future)
One last note — I have a list of SRE topics I want to cover, but if you want me to cover a specific angle or do a research piece on a specific company, like my review of Netflix’s SRE practices, please add a comment.