SRE stands for...Skydiving Resilience Engineer

Tuesday, March 15, 2022 - 11:00 am11:45 am

Victor Lei, USPA A-96761

Abstract: 

Skydiving, especially more than once, can be viewed as an exercise in risk management (and also a lot of fun!)

In this talk, we take a look at the safety procedures practiced by the skydiving community that relate to the guiding principles of SRE. We discuss the evolution of altimeters and software metric systems, highlight the dangers of hero mentality and overconfidence, as well as draw parallels between gamedays and incident management with pre-jump preparations and free fall plan execution. This talk will share concrete examples and parables that will give attendees a visceral understanding of soft concepts such as the "bus factor", blameless postmortems, the Goldilocks approach to tribal knowledge, and the importance of developing emotional resilience.

tl;dr: we will explore core SRE concepts through skydiving goggles; come jump with me!

Victor Lei, USPA A-96761

After a 3-year tenure as an SRE for the internal telemetry team at Bloomberg, I helped build an internal self-service chaos engineering platform as a resilience engineer.

I think curiosity is a core value of SREs and action to investigate such curiosity a natural impulse. I found myself wondering what safety systems the skydiving community must have developed and so, naturally acquired my "A license in a week" at Skydive Spaceland.

I was trained as an electrical engineer ’17 at Cooper Union, so please talk to me about how stationarity relates to time series analysis. Connect with my personal brand "Skydiving Resilience Engineer" or find me as @Aergonus.

SREcon22 Americas Open Access Sponsored by Blameless

BibTeX
@conference {278124,
author = {Victor Lei},
title = {{SRE} stands {for...Skydiving} Resilience Engineer},
year = {2022},
address = {San Francisco, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}

Presentation Video