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Dan Slimmon

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Lecture: Queueing theory on a cocktail napkin Queues are everywhere, and they follow mathematical rules. Learn a few of those rules! It'll go a...
25th Jun 2025
50

Lecture: Queueing theory on a cocktail napkin

from Dan Slimmon [alt+shift+b] in programming

25th Jun 2025
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.
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did u ever read so hard u accidentally wrote? Owning a production Postgres database is never boring. The other day, I’m looking for trouble (as I...
14th Mar 2025
58

did u ever read so hard u accidentally wrote?

from Dan Slimmon [alt+shift+b] in programming

14th Mar 2025
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...
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Is ops a bullshit job? I recently had the pleasure of reading anthropologist David Graeber’s 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs: A...
11th Feb 2025
97

Is ops a bullshit job?

from Dan Slimmon [alt+shift+b] in programming

11th Feb 2025
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...
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Incident SEV scales are a waste of time Ask an engineering leader about their incident response protocol and they’ll tell you about their...
29th Jan 2025
83

Incident SEV scales are a waste of time

from Dan Slimmon [alt+shift+b] in programming

29th Jan 2025
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...
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Putting a meaningful dent in your error backlog We often don't realize how noisy the errors have gotten until things are already well out of hand....
15th Aug 2024
127

Putting a meaningful dent in your error backlog

from Dan Slimmon [alt+shift+b] in programming

15th Aug 2024
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...
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No Observability Without Theory: The Talk Last month, I had the unadulterated pleasure of presenting “No Observability Without Theory” at...
3rd Jul 2024
121

No Observability Without Theory: The Talk

from Dan Slimmon [alt+shift+b] in programming

3rd Jul 2024
Last month, I had the unadulterated pleasure of presenting “No Observability Without Theory” at Monitorama 2024. If you’ve never been to Monitorama, I can’t recommend it enough. I think it’s the best tech conference, period. This talk was adapted from an old blog post of mine,...
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Fight knowledge decay with a rich Incident Summary It only takes a few off-the-rails incidents in your software career to realize the importance of...
14th Jun 2024
108

Fight knowledge decay with a rich Incident Summary

from Dan Slimmon [alt+shift+b] in programming

14th Jun 2024
It only takes a few off-the-rails incidents in your software career to realize the importance of writing things down. That’s why so many companies’ incident response protocols define a scribe role. The scribe’s job, generally, is to take notes on everything that happens. In other...
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The World Record for Loneliness What's the farthest any person has been from the nearest other person?
6th May 2024
84

The World Record for Loneliness

from Dan Slimmon [alt+shift+b] in programming

6th May 2024
What's the farthest any person has been from the nearest other person?
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Clinical troubleshooting: diagnose any production issue, fast. Over the years, I've developed a reliable method for harnessing the diagnostic power of groups. My...
8th Mar 2024
77

Clinical troubleshooting: diagnose any production issue, fast.

from Dan Slimmon [alt+shift+b] in programming

8th Mar 2024
Over the years, I've developed a reliable method for harnessing the diagnostic power of groups. My approach is derived from a different field in which groups of experts with various levels of context need to reason together about problems in a complex, dynamic system:...
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Interviewing engineers for diagnostic skills In SaaS, when we’re hiring engineers, we usually imagine that their time will mostly be spent...
20th Feb 2024
68

Interviewing engineers for diagnostic skills

from Dan Slimmon [alt+shift+b] in programming

20th Feb 2024
In SaaS, when we’re hiring engineers, we usually imagine that their time will mostly be spent building things. So we never forget to interview for skills at building stuff. Sometimes we ask candidates to write code on the fly. Other times we ask them to whiteboard out a sensible...
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