The future is bright

Back in September of 2020 I took the opportunity of a lifetime when I joined Nobl9 as Principal Site Reliability Engineer. As someone who has spent the last half of a decade focused on SLO-based approaches to reliability, it was a dream come true to come work for the first company focused entirely on that.

Fast forward a few months and we quickly saw our GA release approaching. I took on the role of Director of SRE in order to build out the best team I could to ensure Nobl9 itself could function reliably.

And now, exactly one year to the day later, I’m excited to announce the next step in my journey: I will be leaving the SRE team in very capable hands and moving into the role of Principal Reliability Advocate.

My primary passion has long been education. I love sharing what I’ve learned as well as collaborating with and learning from others. There is so much good we can do in this industry if we all shared more: lessons learned, practices developed, processes uncovered. Far too often – especially on the operational side of things – our industry can be a stressful one. The stresses of unreliable systems, having to carry a pager, managing incidents, and not having proper observability into things can have a real toll on people. I’ve seen it first hand as someone who suffered first class burnout a few years back.

But we can do better. By building more reliable systems and teams we can reduce these stressors, and this ultimately leads to not just happier engineers but happier customers as well.

In my role as Principal Reliability Advocate I will be spending more time with you, the person reading this. I’ll be working on product development to ensure the features we’re building are the ones you need; I’ll be refocusing on my community efforts and hoping to drive discussions across companies and step back into public speaking; but I’ll also continue to help architect Nobl9 to be the most reliable platform it can be.

"As part of this change I’m introducing new office hours – time dedicated to the community at large. Let’s chat about anything you’d like! You can book time here."

2022 is going to be a very exciting year. On the Nobl9 side of things you won’t believe the features and changes we have up our sleeves. In the industry at large I see so many wonderful communities continuing to make ours a better one to work in. And at the human level hopefully this is the year we can all start hanging out again and collaborating in person.

I have a lot of optimism right now. The future is bright and tomorrow is waiting for us. I can’t wait to see you there.

Image by Leoni Milano on Unsplash.com