This is a long post with a lot of content. A lot of it, on paper, is very good. I accomplished a lot of things and reached a few important milestones. And I have a lot of books, movies, podcasts, and whatnot to recommend. But these year-in-review posts are just as much for me as for anyone else. So, before we get to the good stuff, I’m going to complain. This year was miserable. Compared to the…
I did, in fact, write a 2020 Year in Review post, but didn’t have the heart to finish it. Luckily, I’m in a slightly better state of mind this time around. This post will be a combination of the past two years. I’ll try to keep it brief. My last indoor dining experience (which is a phrase people say now), February 2020. First, let’s acknowledge The Horribleness . The things that were bad. The…
Update: I am happily employed! I’m leaving this post up as a template for others. I’m Alice Goldfuss , a Senior SRE/Infra/Systems engineer with years of experience working on high-throughput platforms at scale. I’ve been part of the larger tech community since 2015, and have driven industry-wide conversations around infrastructure design, incident response, on-call rotations, and team workflows.…
With the spread of COVID-19, many tech companies are sending employees home to work remotely. As someone who has worked remotely for multiple companies, in different setups, I wanted to offer some assurances and tips for maintaining your mental health while adjusting to this new life. This is a long post, but I hope it brings you some amount of comfort and support in the days ahead. It’s ok to…
This will be a long post, because it was a long year. At the end of 2018, I decided to largely cut back on public speaking, so I could focus on my work. I had a few things I wanted to accomplish in 2019: write more technical blog posts open source a project I was leading at work make more charity t-shirts learn a new language I was excited for a quieter, more focused year. Instead, the following…
I’m a very organized person. I know this because I love lists. I write lists everywhere. In my notebook, in my Notes app, on empty envelopes, receipts, paper bags. As a kid I would write them on my wrists (my mother hated that). Periodically I compile the lists together, figure out which items to do first, and scribble them out when complete. And I know the system is working because everything…
I’ve been giving talks and ranting in tweets for several years now, and the same question crops up again and again: “How do I get into SRE? How do I get there from here ?” My answer is usually rambling and long. So long, that sometimes I don’t even write back. There is simply too much to say! Too much history. Too much context. Too many factors for each person’s individual situation. So, here it…
One of the most powerful concepts in programming is branching, which most new programmers learn as If-Else statements. This approachable logic flow makes it easy to navigate choices and is present in nearly every codebase out there. In some languages there is a variation of this logic flow called a case statement (or switch statement), which is a cleaner way of dealing with many If-Else sequences.…
2018, the year that felt like ten. Time hopped and jogged and stood still, twisted me all around, chewed me up and spat me out with every horrible update of the news cycle. Still, this year wasn’t all bad! I gave my first keynote , saw some of my code open-sourced , and attended a Frida Kahlo exhibit at the V&A. I started my year with istio and kernel crashes, progressed to large Kubernetes…
Have you been trying to profile your Kubernetes applications with perf ? Maybe you want to see what all the FlameGraphs fuss is about ? If your version of Docker was upgraded within the last year, you’ll likely run into issues. Starting in v17.06 of Docker, perf_event_open is blocked by the default seccomp profile . Which means running perf inside your container will get you this:…
Despite working in tech with an engineering title, my only degree is a BFA in Film and Animation. While some schools emphasize critique in their film programs, mine was more technical and hands-on. That meant I was shooting 16mm film by my second week, organizing set crews by my second quarter, and did everything from directing commercials to writing my own imaging codecs. It’s also how I learned…
I have a tradition of writing down my accomplishments from the past year and sticking them on the wall in my favorite depression zone-out corner to comfort me in the winter. This year, I thought I would share the results. It’s a nice way for people to catch up with my recent shenanigans, as well as a chance for me to categorize and reflect on the parts I liked the most and would like to continue…
For the majority of my life, I was not a social drinker. Not only did I abstain from alcohol, but also any sort of caffeine not found in a good hot chocolate. I made it through high school, college, and the first years of my professional life without a beer, latte, or late-night crunch energy drink. Some of it was personal morals, but most of it was personal taste. I would sip friends’ drinks,…
About a month ago, I had the pleasure of taking a tutorial led by the fantastic Brendan Gregg on creating FlameGraphs using the Linux perf toolset. I recommend reading his many blog posts on the subject, but in short: while perf is an excellent resource for debugging kernel and user space processes, FlameGraphs make the data even easier to consume. Now, if the process you’re trying to profile is…
On Monday evening I launched a Teespring campaign to raise money for Outreachy , a fantastic nonprofit that helps underrepresented people in tech find internships. The shirt in question reads “‘LADIES’ IS GENDER NEUTRAL” and is only offered in women’s sizes. However, I presented the women’s sizes as unisex and replied to requests for men’s sizing with phrases women have heard many times. This…
Back in January I decided to toy around with some internal tooling, so our support staff could directly page specific engineering teams. To do this, I dug into PagerDuty’s REST API with the aim of making a simple UI in front of it. That’s when I noticed something strange. After a few minutes of staring at the screen, cogs slowly turning, I had my weekend planned. The Setup Here is an example call…
So, a server rebooted. Perhaps I’ve been lucky in the developers I work with, but whenever a host reboots, I always think hardware failure first. I treated this case no differently and jumped onto the host to run some quick diagnostics. Since I deal in Dell equipment, my first stop is always check_openmanage . It gives a quick report on CPUs, DIMMs, chassis, power supplies, etc from the command…
Imposter Syndrome used to rule my life. After all, I was an engineer (hah!) with a film degree, and everyone I worked with was much more intelligent and experienced than I’d ever be. I would never get to their level, everything I said was stupid, and if I ever received a promotion it was due to diversity quotas or a one-time fluke. My fixation was so bad that it was brought up in my yearly…