9 Years of Failure: How Racing Crappy Cars Made Me a Better SRE

Tuesday, December 08, 2020 - 3:40 pm4:00 pm

Ryan Doherty, LinkedIn

Abstract: 

Racing crapcans ($500 cars) is a lot like being a SRE. Build a reliable system, monitor it, go oncall, and complain about how everything is broken all the time. Learn what racing crapcans is like and the lessons I've learned over 9 years of mechanical, personal and team failures that apply to being a SRE. Lots of anecdotes of racing incidents, pictures of cars in various states of rapid unscheduled disassembly and occasionally photos of cars racing.

Ryan Doherty, LinkedIn

Ryan is a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at LinkedIn. His passions at work at performance tuning, usability and monitoring. In his spare time he races in the 24 Hours of Lemons racing series in the United States.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {262178,
author = {Ryan Doherty},
title = {9 Years of Failure: How Racing Crappy Cars Made Me a Better {SRE}},
booktitle = {SREcon20 Americas (SREcon20 Americas)},
year = {2020},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon20americas/presentation/doherty},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = dec
}

Presentation Video