I watched several really interesting talks from SRECon22 Americas this week, and in particular I’d like to highlight:

• Principled Performance Analytics, Narayan Desai and Brent Bryan from Google. Some interesting thoughts on quantitative analysis of live performance data for monitoring and observability purposes, moving past simple percentile analysis.
• The ‘Success’ in SRE is Silent, Casey Rosenthal from Verica.io. Interesting thoughts here on the visibility of reliability, qualitative analysis of systems, and why regulation and certification might not be the right thing for web systems.
• Building and Running a Diversity-focused Pre-internship program for SRE, from Andrew Ryan at Facebook Meta. Some good lessons-learned here from an early-career internship-like program, in its first year.
• Taking the 737 to the Max, Nickolas Means from Sym. A really interesting analysis of the Boeing 737 Max failures from both a technical and cultural perspective, complete with some graph tracing to understand failure modes.

I also ran across some other articles that I’ve been actively recommending and sharing with friends and colleagues, including:

• Plato’s Dashboards, Fred Hebert at Honeycomb. This article has some great analysis of how easily-measurable metrics are often poor proxies for the information we’re actually interested in, and discussing qualitative research methods as a way to gain more insight.
• The End of Roe Will Bring About A Sea Change In The Encryption Debate, Rianna Pfefferkorn from the Stanford Internet Observatory. You should absolutely go read this article, but to sum up: Law enforcement in states than ban abortion is now absolutely part of the threat model that encrypted messaging defends against. No one claiming to be a progressive should be arguing in favor of “exceptional access” or other law enforcement access to encryption.