Queues are everywhere, and they follow mathematical rules. Learn a few of those rules! It'll go a long way to making you a stronger SRE.

Owning a production Postgres database is never boring. The other day, I’m looking for trouble (as I am wont to do), and I notice this weird curve in the production database metrics: So we’ve got these spikes in WALWrite: the number of processes waiting to write to the write-ahead log (or “WAL”). The write-ahead log … Continue reading did u ever read so hard u accidentally wrote?

I recently had the pleasure of reading anthropologist David Graeber’s 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Graeber defines a bullshit job as, a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels … Continue reading Is ops a bullshit job?

Ask an engineering leader about their incident response protocol and they’ll tell you about their severity scale. “The first thing we do is we assign a severity to the incident,” they’ll say, “so the right people will get notified.” And this is sensible. In order to figure out whom to get involved, decision makers need … Continue reading Incident SEV scales are a waste of time

We often don't realize how noisy the errors have gotten until things are already well out of hand. After all, we've got shit to do. Deadlines to hit. By the time we decide to get serious about error management, a huge, impenetrable, meaningless backlog of errors has already accumulated. I call this stuff "slag."