Recent content in Posts on Alienchow
A blip appeared on my phone while I was on the treadmill last week, it was yet another LinkedIn post talking about the wonderful value AI has brought upon us. Day after day, anywhere I look, I have to sit through opinions that are exuberantly optimistic. Yet all examples given are always tiny tools, and I have yet to see a real-world example of agentic usage in production critical systems that…
Thanks HN folks for all the comments. To clarify a bit, the cables are pulled through PVC conduits under the flooring before being buried in cement. Currently the hypothesis for why the cable disintegrated so quickly is hydrolysis. Singapore is extremely humid after all. A second possibility is that I keep the leftover wall paints ( Nippon Paint Vinilex 5000 ) in the same room and have noticed…
To my child. This week, I showered you while watching you play with your shower toys. As usual, you refused to cooperate, insisting on filling the tiny stacking cups with water before wasting copious amounts of shampoo into the cup to create bubbles. As you dipped your tiny fingers in to smear the bubbly foam all over the bathroom walls to create your latest soapy murals in glee, I rinsed off the…
Planning a Future-Proof Home Network Around early 2022, I finally received the keys to my BTO flat in Singapore. The whole construction project was delayed by a year due to COVID-19, resulting in a total wait time of 5 years. As our family was still residing in Switzerland back then, we flew back to Singapore for 6 weeks just to deal with planning the renovations. As shown in the photo, there was…
孤愁瞻逐妄 履践绕居频 与友焦谈饮 终究蜃景鸣
“Do you know what is read-copy-update?” Balázs randomly mumured on a Friday afternoon while I was doom scrolling the endless stream of despair on Memegen some time shortly after the Jan 2023 layoffs . Friday wasn’t one of the team designated RTO days, but I decided to work from office anyway for some focus time, as few people would be coming in. B: “It’s pretty…
It goes without saying that even the most disciplined SRE functions eventually experience pager burnout. Over time, I’ve found that the reasons can be condensed down to 4 main reasons: Lack of pager review Undersized teams Incompatible on-call shift length Inadequate on-call compensation Pager Review Treat a Page Like a Page The most mindblowing thing to me was seeing teams use Slack…
Reliability Theatrics Galore Recently, I have observed several anti-patterns going on in teams: Release engineer accidentally skipping a step during deployment causing an incident. No one knew how to roll back a service because no one knew where the SOP was. Action items in the post-mortem reports added more manual checks to the ever-growing checklist The recurring theme in all the above is the…
Debugging SRE is a series of low effort brain dumps, consisting of reliability practices that I have observed, and to discuss anti-patterns masquerading as reliability diligence. After resigning from the Google tech island to practise Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) elsewhere, I have come to realise that many organisations fancy the branding and engineering credibility of a tech organisation…