Panel: Learning from Adaptations to Coronavirus

Wednesday, December 09, 2020 - 2:10 pm2:55 pm

Moderator: Nora Jones, Jeli.io
Panelists: Fred Hebert, Postmates; Lorin Hochstein, Netflix; Vanessa Huerta Granda, Enova

Abstract: 

We are all in the middle of a worldwide incident in which we are all incident responders in some way. The large-scale disruption that Covid-19 has introduced to day-to-day functioning of society has profound implications for the software systems that are a part of daily life. And the experts tasked with keeping those systems running are no exception.

In this panel, we will talk through the 5 key themes that emerged from a series of two facilitated video calls with engineers and managers from several different organizations, along with expert suggestions on how to adapt to some of these problems, all backed up by research. We will interview 3 participants from organizations that had to unexpectedly scale and adjust during this time and how they managed this.

Nora Jones, Jeli.io

Nora is the Founder and CEO of Jeli.io. She is a dedicated and driven technology leader and software engineer with a passion for the intersection between how people and software work in practice in distributed systems. In November 2017 she keynoted at AWS re:Invent to share her experiences helping organizations large and small reach crucial availability with an audience of ~40,000 people, helping kick off the Chaos Engineering movement we see today. She created and founded the www.learningfromincidents.io movement to develop and open-source cross-organization learnings and analysis from reliability incidents across various organizations, and the business impacts of doing so.

Fred Hebert, Postmates

Fred Hebert is the author of three programming books about Erlang and Elixir, and using these languages for testing and production work. He co-founded and is a board member at the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation, and his currently a staff engineer at Postmates, with a focus on architecture reviews, learning from incidents, and poking at various things. He was previously Systems Architect, principal member of technical staff on cloud platforms, worked in real-time bidding, and provided commercial programming training.

Lorin Hochstein, Netflix

Lorin Hochstein is a Sr. Software Engineer on the Managed Delivery Team at Netflix. He was previously Sr. Software Engineer at SendGrid Labs, Lead Architect for Cloud Services at Nimbis Services, Computer Scientist at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Vanessa Huerta Granda, Enova

Vanessa Huerta Granda (she/her) manages Resilience Engineering at Enova where she focuses on their Production Incident process, learning from incidents, and leading the on-call rotation of Incident Commanders. She has led the Chicago Women in Technology Conference and started the Hispanic or Latinx Alliance @ Enova. She is passionate about continuous improvement, getting teams to talk to each other, and Diversity and Inclusion in Tech.

BibTeX
@inproceedings {262267,
author = {Nora Jones and Fred Hebert and Lorin Hochstein and Vanessa Huerta Granda},
title = {Panel: Learning from Adaptations to Coronavirus},
booktitle = {SREcon20 Americas (SREcon20 Americas)},
year = {2020},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon20americas/presentation/jones},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = dec
}

Presentation Video