Recent content on pid.ren
It has been several years since my first musings about Risk being the Single Most Important Vocabulary in SRE . The original link doesn’t even work anymore, and that got me thinking it may be a good time to refresh my thoughts on the topic. These are an aggregation of what I’ve learned from mentors, experiences, and having had the chance to make copious amounts of mistakes - which…
Yes, I know—“better manager” is obviously a self-assessment. But hear me out. I discovered Dungeons & Dragons late, in 2023, after watching Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and playing Baldur’s Gate 3. What followed in 2024 and 2025 was a full-blown obsession. I spent almost every weekend playing D&D—at the local game shop, online, anywhere I could find a table. It’s…
contact at pid dot ren / linkedin / Copyright @ 2026 Ren Lee
Hi, I’m Ren! 👋 🚀 I am, first and foremost, a reliability engineer at heart. I care deeply about the intersection of technical systems and human processes - making them incrementally safer, more reliable, and more trustworthy over time. To me, a reliable system is flexible, elastic, and easy to understand - in how it operates and in how it fails. I believe reliability isn’t a…
I came across an amazing piece of article over this weekend, one that provided an in-depth analysis of the tragedy of Air France Flight 447, “The Long Way Down: The crash of Air France flight 447” . (Disclaimer: I am in no shape or form affiliated with this author or Medium - I simply think this was an astoundingly well done article and I encourage anyone that is interested in systems…
I’ve recently completed my first year as an engineering manager - specifically on the Site Reliability team for CloudVision as a Service at Arista. In many ways I’m writing this for myself moreso than anything else - a way to reflect on this year that flew by so quickly, to catalogue what I’ve learned, to look ahead into next year. I also hope this helps anyone that is…
Ever since I’ve started my career in software engineering, I’ve always been obsessed with one question in mind — what can go wrong? 💭 What can go wrong with the code I just wrote? 💭 What can go wrong with this framework I am using? 💭 What happens when something “goes wrong”? Do I have a fallback mechanism? Kill switch? Sometimes I would even obsess over a single…
(In this article I use the term “management” loosely to refer to any layer of management, not just managers.) As a software engineer one of the most critical skillset is being able to discern which tool is the right one for the job that needs to be done. This deserves its own blog post, but in short a software engineer must know what language, features of a language, framework, and…