Not all engineers are equally invested in understanding what our software is actually doing - should they be and why? Is building a successful software product more than just a technical exercise in observability? How do we get more insights into the business direction of our product? Can we only truly test performance in production and what does that look like?

I talk to Stephen Townsend from Squared Up and the Slight Reliability podcast, all about SLOs and SREs and observability platforms and patterns and trying to predict what our customers want in the future.

This was a really in-depth and wide-ranging discussion and a lot of fun to put together. Hope you enjoy!

NOTES

How To Draw An Owl Meme

Sooner, Safer, Happier - Jonathan Smart

Observability Engineering - Charity Majors et al

Accelerate - Nicole Forsgren et al

Slight Reliability with Joey Hendricks (performance testing in production)

QUOTES

[03:19 ] "I've just come from a massive enterprise before and there was a massive disconnection between the day-to-day work or what's, what's on the minds of the people in those engineering teams versus the actual customers and the business." [ST]

[13:55 ] "It's a measure of how well you can understand and explain any state that your system can get into no matter how novel or bizarre" [ST quoting "Observability Engineering"]

[14:30 ] "now we're serverless and containers and all these ephemeral objects and well, they're being scattered everywhere. It's just hard to know what's happening" [ST]

[18:13 ] "investment in the customer experience for some is greater than for others" [RB]

[23:08 ] "Hey we are making technology changes. How does it change these other things?" [ST]

[25:37 ] "it's very weird to come from an engineering background and be talking about all these business objectives and things, but it's great" [ST]

[27:46 ] "if you're doing software observability, it needs to be thoughtful and continual. Like it can't be. We've set it up, we are done." [ST]

[34:33 ] "The most successful companies are doing that right now, and they're doing, they're following the best practices that we read about in all these great books, accelerate, et cetera, and DevOps handbook" [RB]