Making of the SRE Omelette

Episode 17 - SRE for Managers

Marion provides advice for managers and leaders to create a safe environment to foster innovation and teamwork with a diverse team in this episode - and a creative way to tackle technical debt.Managers provide leadership, support and mentorship to their teams - they help employees reach their goals and shelter them from unnecessary distractions to help them focus. Marion shares with the SRE community challenges she has observed from her team, as well as issues experienced as a manager - including much more toil.Marion gives perspectives of an effective team and what can be done to assemble and maintain it. In addition, advices for how practitioners can balance maintaining SLA/SLO, backlogs and keeping up with education and trends in the industry for career progression.Lastly, Marion summarizes with a fantastic recipe for the SRE Omelette for a well managed SRE team.Things to listen for:[01:51 - 04:43] Marion's career journey[05:15 - 08:15] What led to the manager role[09:01 - 12:02] Toil in the manager role[14:00 - 16:13] Marion talk about team's challenge[16:35 - 18:35] Challenge as a manager[20:03 - 23:24] Composition of an effective team[24:06 - 26:15] Recognizing people who prevented fires[26:25 - 29:22] What it means to be a good manager[30:16 - 34:51] How to help the team with building their skills[35:13 - 38:54] How to get into the profession[41:08 - 46:18] The future of SRE[46:43 - 48:57] Marion's ingredient and recipe for SRE Omelette

Episode 16 - Bonus episode with Kyle on Recipe for Plant based Denver Omelette

In this bonus episode, Kyle shares his secret ingredient to make Omelette or anything taste extra great. As well as his two favorite styles of Omelette and their recipe.

Episode 16 - Reliability Engineering

This episode is about transforming SRE into how we do business and incorporate Reliability Engineering into the process of building products and features. Kyle Brown, IBM Fellow, VP, CTO for the CIO join us in this episode to talk about this mindset shift.Kyle discusses how Reliability Engineering can be considered in the entire solution lifecycle, how to get there and what it looks like. Kyle also shares his insights for engineers to progress in their career and where Reliability Engineering will become in the future.Lastly, as an avid chef, Kyle also shares with us recipe for a real Omelette in a bonus episode!Things to listen for:[01:31 - 05:04] What SRE means to Kyle[05:42 - 11:17] Reliability Engineering is a life cycle effort[11:57 - 15:50] Kyle's take on Non-Functional-Requirements[22:04 - 26:02] Would we get to self-running business?[26:54 - 33:19] How to get started to get to the SRE culture[33:38 - 40:46] Kyle's insights for growing your career[41:44 - 44:51] Kyle recipe for the SRE Omelette

Episode 15 - The three-legged stool of SRE

A three-legged stool will not wobble and is stable even on an uneven surface. In this episode, we listen to three Site Reliability Engineers working together to deliver client and business success. Abhay Choudhary, Andrew Lindsay, and Ashley Tate share their journeys that led to the roles they're in today in Data Science, Observability and Automation. The three disciplines resemble a three-legged stool that enables a stable progression for improving solution reliability. Conversations also took us to what they enjoy the most about their jobs and what they'd prefer to do less of. Abhay, Andrew and Ashley also share with the audience their tips to get started in the SRE profession and ingredients to achieve the SRE outcome.Things to Listen for:[02:55 - 06:23] Andrew, Abhay and Ashley's journey that led them to the current role[06:43 - 13:46] Abhay, Ashley and Andrew sharing what they enjoy the most about what they do[13:58 - 18:44] Andrew, Ashley and Abhay sharing what they like to do less of[19:17 - 21:04] Abhay's ah-ha moment for data science[21:41 - 23:03] Andrew's ah-ha moment for observability[23:51 - 25:43] Ashley's ah-ha moment - art of asking for help[26:35 - 30:35] Ashley, Andrew and Abhay's tip for people getting into SRE[31:08 - 33:28] The SRE Omelette ingredient and recipe from Andrew, Abhay and Ashley

Episode 14 - There is no SRE without Team

SRE is a team sport - without assists from team members, business and client successes would not be possible. Bill shares how we can be successful via learning, knowing the indicators to ask for help and how to foster an environment where people feel safe to ask for help. Lastly, his ingredient and recipe on building a high performing team. Listen in to Bill and let's level up on your teamwork!Things to Listen for:[03:58 - 05:56] Bill's Teamwork make AI work story[08:44 - 10:48] The art of learning[11:49 - 16:11] Art of asking for help[17:03 - 18:57] Culture to foster environment that is safe to ask for help[19:56 - 24:40] What makes a great team[27:57 - 31:12] Ingredient and recipe for teamwork

Episode 13 - Design Driven SRE

Enterprise Design Thinking has positively influenced how companies build products that deliver happy user experience.Can the same practice and mindset be applied to SRE? And if so, How?Join us to discuss this topic is Karel Vredenburg. Karel is the VP of client insights and research at IBM. He is a great champion of tech vitality and has tremendous industry experiences improving the user experience of human interface to technology.Listen in and hear Karel’s journey that transformed IBM, clients, c-suite executives, and academia to embrace Enterprise Design Thinking to creatively solve problems and surface designs that lead to happy users.Things to Listen for:[01:40 - 02:54] What is Enterprise Design Thinking[03:08 - 05:00] What building software was like before EDT[05:00 - 07:41] Karel's ah-ha moment[08:22 - 12:33] EDT can be used to solve all kinds of challenges, including SRE[12:39 - 14:04] How we embrace EDT[14:44 - 16:38] What's next[17:17 - 18:01] How we help teams who don't have full-time designer staffing[18:38 - 20:50] Karel's ingredient and recipe for happy users

Episode 12 - Incident Learning via Story Telling

Storytelling helps with learning because engaging stories are easy to remember and are interesting. David shares why he influenced the IBM CIO to learn from incidents via Story Telling and how other organization can follow this model to learn more about how the systems work and improve business and client success.Listen to this episode to gain ideas on how you can turn your incident learning into an engaging session people look forward to attend and drive the outcome of better business and client success.

Episode 11 - Failure is not an option

Humanity have an enduring desire to explore space - it has led us to push the boundaries of science and technology. Our guest today, Robert Barron has found an amazing connection between space exploration and SRE. I like to think he takes us to where no SRE has gone before! Robert shares with us his favourite stories that draws parallel from Lunar Landing, Shuttle, space exploration to SRE. He also gives what SRE can take as inspiration from "Failure Is Not an Option" to build systems.