SRE NEWSLETTER

Issue #31 // June 11, 2021

An Incomplete List of Skills Senior Engineers Need, Beyond Coding
// skamille.medium.com
Camille Fournier, author of The Manager's Path, provides a list of 23 skills for varying career levels, from senior, to staff, and beyond.
Building a Healthy On-Call Culture
// developers.soundcloud.com
On-Call duty for SoundCloud engineers is optional but important to their engineering culture. This article describes their practices and how they're center around mutual respect.
What is Resilience Engineering?
// luminis.eu
(Video + transcript) In this TEQnation lightning talk, Piet van Dongen explains what resilience engineering is, why every software person should know about it, and how you can start practicing it.
How does Google Keep Build Times Low?
// jmmv.dev
Monorepos are an interesting beast. If mended properly, they indeed enable a level of uniformity and code quality that is hard to achieve otherwise. This post looks at how Google is able to successfully run the world's largest monorepo while keeping build times minimal.
The Case for Continuous Documentation
// virtuallifestyle.nl
Every engineers worse nightmare, documentation. But Joep Piscaer provides his justification for the practice of updating documentation in lockstep with updating the codebase.
GitOps at Home: Automate Code Deploys with Kubernetes and Flux
// thenewstack.io
Flux is an open source stack of tools that make it possible to keep Kubernetes clusters in sync with external sources of configuration, such as repositories on GitHub. This article walks you through getting Flux up and running, so you can empower your Kubernetes and GitHub connection with continuous deployment.
Demo-Driven Development
// rubick.com
Demo-driven development is a practice where you use regular demos, a standard week-by-week project plan, and value-based user stories to plan the team’s work.
What the Fastly Outage can Teach us About Writing Error Messages
// onlineornot.com
Fastly's CDN had an outage, taking some of the internet's largest websites down. The majority of internet users aren't trained in the art of reading HTTP status codes. We should take this as an opportunity to improve our error messages.
Terraform v1.0
// github.com
Terraform v1.0 represents the culmination of several years of work. It intentionally has no significant changes compared to Terraform v0.15.5.
Changes to Docker Hub Autobuilds
// docker.com
Docker's Autobuild service has been targeted by bad actors who are taking advantage of this service with the goal of abusing it for crypto mining. They have announced they will be discontinuing Autobuilds on the free tier starting June 18, 2021.