log.andvari.net

I still run nomad at home.

Something I've been reminded of the last while: old social media posts are not assets, they're liabilities.

One of my favourite phrases to remind people of as I'm fumbling about the business of producing reliable systems is "We Should Disappoint People Early".

Asking the Right Questions A while back when I was looking for a fulltime gig (and when I was contracting, of course), I had the opportunity to do a bunch of interviews (including the kind of informal interviews you do to get a new contracting client).

One of the more impactful bits of "DEI work" we (ohai Sara Smollett) did at the G was helping to re-write our job descriptions for SRE (I later re-wrote the internal job ladder for SRE, but that's probably not as directly related).

Part of my day-job as head of Engineering at Google Ireland was attending talks and events/Q&A for local interest groups like Engineers Ireland.

Communication Scales with Scale Communicating with your team scales up as your team grows - it's an experience not unlike the individual engineer to senior engineer to staff engineer path.

Bit of a shuffle in what musical projects I'm working on - two groups I'm with have fizzled (at least, my involvement with them has) and one other is coming up.

On July 19th 2004, I spent my first day at Google.

Going to be playing a bit of catch-up, since it's been a few months.

A few months further into my "not working full-time and seeing how that goes" journey.

Recycling old talk proposals for fun and...that's it!

The last few weeks were a bit of a hive of activity.

Standard disclaimer: Maybe don't do this in production?

Further to my last post where I went away for a few weeks, that away-time featured a power cut at home.

A lot has happened over the last few months, so rather than a big catch-all post, I'm going to do a few posts over the next few weeks.

The last several years have seen a huge upsurge in the popularity of the DevOps/SRE/Production Engineering model, with companies large and small adopting some of the practices and mindsets.

My last few weeks have ended up with me having about 30% of my regular day-job meeting/stuff-I-gotta-do load; due to a perfect storm of school stuff and other adventures (I'm currently collecting driving license categories!

I've mostly ported my homelab across, and took the opportunity to add actual monitoring and actual resiliency.

One of the most constructive things I've found when facing a difficult work situation is to externalise and write things down -- I do quite well with talking things through with folks, and coaching and mentoring is something I get a lot of energy out of.

In among posts about fiddling with electronics and occasional life updates, here's a life update!

Further adventures in pretending homelab is real work!

I've been gradually rolling out more homelab updates, including whats turned into a bit of a rebuild and de-flakiness effort.

Now that I've a bit more time on my hands (more on that later) the predictable swing back toward being able to do actual tech fiddling has started (I Hope).

It's November!

I spent a number of days at SRECon 2022 in Amsterdam, and gave a talk that I'd had rattling around in my head for a wee while - roughtly based on a paper I left at Google when I left.

2021 was a year.

I'm allowed one cheat blog post, as a treat.

After being asked by a work colleague to say words about OKRs and if they're a good thing to adopt, I realised I had more words than fit in an email or short doc -- so, here's a slightly longer doc on my view of OKRs, tempered by 15 years or so of using t…

This past week was my first week at elastic.co, where I am now a Director of Engineering - taking on the SRE group and making Elastic Cloud go (Elastic Cloud is essentially the SaaS version of Elastic Search - i.e. you can of course run it yourself, or you

The last few days (among other things) saw a little work on the previous project, as well as taking advantage of having new hardware to mess about with.

Showed up to a few low-key conferences last week (Multitasking between SLOconf and o11yfest for a few days).

Thanks to my accomodating erstwhile colleagues, I'm able to publish the original paper (with minor redactions so it makes sense for an external audience).

Let's try every week or so?

So, last week was my last week at Google.

One of my excuses for not updating this more often is the fiddly nature of making sure I have a working Pelican install.

I'm now most of the way through the ~month or so I took off work.

My last attempt at doing the Home Automation/Domotics/Whatyacallit a few years back mostly involved buying expensive widgets, determining they are shite, or marketed at US power and outlets, and then discovering that setup and upgrades generally involved…

So I've set both a really good example (take your vacation!)

Short a quick trip to Zurich in January 2020, the trip I was on was the last time I travelled outside Ireland, until now.

It's been over two years, and while I'm still patiently waiting for the demise of Medium, it only took re-running pelican-quickstart to make my makefiles work again.

The last few months have been a bit hectic, let's say that.

This is something I wrote for new Googlers, drinking from the information hose.

This is a paper I wrote for consumption of people doing conferences and trainings at Google.

I was away last week with work to an offsite at the Club Med, which as far as I can gather is one of those soviet-era collective holiday camps for people who weren't in a soviet.

The weather turns and turns.

Further to the Reddit AMA I was involved in a few years back (I am /u/sre_pointyhair) - "The Guy" showed up at my desk last week.

I finally got my grubby mitts on an actual dead-tree copy of the SRE book.

Back from a few days in Prague and beyond, at Border War.

So, case in point (since we love examples).