Announcing Reliability Nightmares (the SRE coloring book)

“We often think of movements as starting with a call to action. But movement research suggests that they actually start with emotion — a diffuse dissatisfaction with the status quo and a broad sense that the current institutions and power structures of the society will not address the problem. This brewing discontent turns into a movement when a voice arises that provides a positive vision and a path forward that’s within the power of the crowd.” — Harvard Business Review

The idea behind SIG-SRE started just like that — with emotion, and knowledge that the status quo would not produce the outcomes that Red Hat needs, in the timeframe it needs them, to become competitive in the managed services business.

In addition to the fun video we created for the kickoff, the team has put together a coloring book to highlight how SREs think and how the practice of SRE impacts service using a Kitchen Nightmares restaurant analogy.

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Lessons learned while bootstrapping new $things

During my career at Red Hat, I’ve had the great pleasure of being a go-to person to bootstrap $things. After a good amount of repetitions, I’ve arrived at a bit of a blueprint on how to do it. Each go at it becoming more and more refined and incorporating lessons learned as each $thing presents its own nuances.

As an engineer exploring ways to bootstrap $things, Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why deeply resonated with me. I began looking for frameworks that let me capture “why” in a way that has unyielding precision, and found the Patrick Lencioni’s Six Critical Questions section in his book The Advantage.

I’ve now used this format several times and am continually impressed by how durable it is. If you can capture the essence of the new $thing in this format, you can look back on it even years in the future, and your intent remains unambiguous.

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What it’s like to work at Red Hat for 8 years…

I wrote this post in July 2017, and I just found it (4 years later) in my Drafts folder.  What a great journey down memory lane it was to read this today.  Ask 2017 me if he knew what he’d be into 4 years on, and…yeah.  Life moves pretty fast.

We have been doing a lot of hiring lately — I am lucky to be at such a company.  It feels like that’s all we’ve done over the time that I’ve been at Red Hat.  In every interview I am routinely asked what is it like to work at Red Hat. Mostly I’d pass on a few relevant anecdotes, and move on.

As I’ve just come up on my 8 year anniversary at Red Hat, I thought I would write some of this stuff down to explain more broadly what it’s like to work at Red Hat, more specifically in the few groups I’ve been in, more specifically my personal experience in those groups…

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Going Full Send on my WFH A/V setup

I tried hard to make it work. But I could never get the results I wanted. The crisp video, clean audio, the BOKEH. Herein lies my adventures (full send, some might say) over the past ~2 months in getting a proper home office A/V setup. It’s not perfect yet, but I’m fairly happy with the improvement. I’ll close this write-up with some of my next steps / gaps.

Starting with some basic tenets:

  • Whatever I end up with has to augment all of my ingrained behaviors; I’m not going to relearn how to use a computer (change operating system) for the sake of this.
  • I’m stuck with the room I’ve got. The walls have odd angles which makes lighting difficult.
  • I don’t know anything about this, so there will be lots of trial, error, and Googling.
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