☀️ The Tech Caffeine #27: This Week in Tech
How to Write a Strategy Statement Your Team Will Actually Remember, Automated SBOM Generation with Paketo Buildpacks, Analyzing SRE Job Postings - From Amazon to Microsoft
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🙊 The Biggest Mistake I See Engineers Make
Throughout my career, the biggest mistake I see engineers make is doing too much work on their own before looping in others.
I’ve experienced this mistake as both an IC and a manager. As an IC, it’s a mistake I made many, many times early in my own career. As a manager, I made the mistake of not recognizing and fixing it in the engineers I’ve managed.
✍🏻 How to Write a Strategy Statement Your Team Will Actually Remember
It’s 4:30 pm on a Friday and your team has to make a critical decision by the close of business but you’re on an overseas flight, unreachable, and unable to help. The team has two options on the table and both seem equally compelling although each has long-term consequences if they get it wrong. How will the team know, without being able to check in with you, which call is the right call to make?
Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.
- MICHAEL PORTER
🧐 Analyzing SRE Job Postings - From Amazon to Microsoft
An analysis of SRE job descriptions from 4 companies highlights what businesses actually expect SREs to do.
Development skills are absolutely critical in order to be an SRE. Scripting for administration or IT Ops purposes is not enough on its own.
The ability to communicate clearly -- including both verbally and in writing -- is more important to SRE work than you may realize.
Network engineering skills, too, are a crucial part of SRE jobs, at least at some companies.
In practice, SRE job descriptions sound more similar to DevOps job ads than you might expect.
📈 Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports anomaly detection for historical data
Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) now offers machine learning based anomaly detection for historical data to identify trends, patterns, and seasonality in the past data. Anomaly detection for historical data enables customers to derive valuable insights from past data, and take appropriate actions to improve the overall efficiency of their applications.
🧾Automated SBOM Generation with Paketo Buildpacks
Generating a software bill of materials (SBOM) is gaining a lot of traction in the software development community. This is a result of the increasing sensitivity of the community to one of the downsides of architecting solutions with external dependencies. Even more so because of the inclusion of vulnerable open source dependencies. This weakness, known as software supply chain vulnerability, is an area of active research and response in the security community.
✅ How we’re building a production readiness review process at Grafana Labs
Production readiness review (PRR) is a process that originated at Google, described as the first step of site reliability engineering engagement in the company’s famous SRE book.
The idea of thoroughly reviewing a product before handing over the pager is a really good one, but except for Google-scale companies, there aren’t that many organizations that can afford dedicated SRE teams.
🐥 Tweet of the Week
