Life after The Chocolate Factory

It’s no secret that in the SRE community, for better or worse, we often look up to large companies (almost always Google), on how we should go about building secure, reliable & maintainable systems. Lots has been said about what they do right but in reality, these approaches are rarely applicable to SREs at smaller organizations who just don’t have the resources to replicate the same systems.

Here’s the thing - it’s not just the core technology that ex-Google SREs miss the most: it’s all the little things. How do you make on-boarding not suck? What’s an effective way of securing systems, but not getting in the way of people doing their jobs? And who the hell ever thought JIRA was a good idea?

This talk is structured as a comedy double act: a recovering Google Engineer seeks therapy from someone who’s lived their whole career outside the walled garden that is Google.