Black Friday—we all know what it looks like. Hundreds of people swarming stores after Thanksgiving, jostling for the best deals. But in light of COVID-19, this arrangement could be dangerous. Over the last few years, Black Friday has become a digital event, and this year should be even moreso. According to Forbes writer Richard Kestenbaum, “88% of global consumers told a Visa study they’re planning to buy gifts this holiday season.” Yet “only 20% of U.S.

In a recent fireside chat with Mohan Bhatkar, Head of Engineering for the Customer Reliability Platform at Mercari, Inc. sat down with Blameless Co-Founder Ashar Rizqi. They talked about scaling while avoiding silos, exciting day-to-day challenges, instilling a culture of empowerment, and more. Here are their top insights and the lightly edited transcript of their conversation.

At Blameless, we value every opportunity to learn. Whether it’s taking time on Focus Fridays to attend a cool webinar, or conducting retrospectives for incidents, lost deals, events, and more, learning is core to our mission. To learn even more about our craft, we decided to start a book club at Blameless. People from every team (engineering, sales, SRE, marketing, product, people, and more) attended.

We’re drinking Pumpkin Spice Lattes, lighting candles, and wearing flannel. Oh, and reading a bunch of great stuff. Here’s the November issue of SREview! This monthly zine features epic Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community.

PagerDuty is a leading on-call management platform that aggregates monitoring and alerting data, notifies on-call teams, and accelerates incident resolution. The platform is used by thousands of teams responsible for software experiences. It integrates incident triage with rapid responder mobilization, so teams can resolve incidents in real time.

Metrics are the golden ticket to knowing what’s going on with your system… or so everyone thinks. But there can be too much of a good thing. Are your metrics really doing you any favors? Are they letting you see into what your customers truly want from you? If not, you might have a problem. You might be fetishizing your metrics. The good news is you’re definitely not alone.

Blameless recently had the pleasure of interviewing Yury Niño Roa, Site Reliability Engineer, Solutions Architect and Chaos Engineering Advocate at ADL Digital Labs. She’s worked in roles ranging from solutions architect, to software engineering professor, to DevOps engineer, to SRE. Additionally, Yury is an avid blogger and conference speaker who regularly presents at events such as Chaos Conf, DevOpsDays Bogotá, and more.

Onboarding is an essential yet challenging part of the hiring process. As your organization matures, more of its processes become unique. This makes it harder for new employees to get up to speed. Investing in custom processes and tooling to achieve your specific goals is a valuable practice. But, you must balance this with an investment in onboarding.

Atlassian JIRA, one of the most popular ticketing systems, allows teams to catalogue incidents, follow-up actions, bugs, stories, and more. As a common tool in any DevOps/SRE operation’s toolchain, JIRA is a key integration at Blameless. Blameless’ integration with JIRA allows teams to automatically generate a ticket within both Blameless and JIRA. This integration also allows teams to track follow-up actions via Blameless’ postmortem tool.

Adopting SRE principles into your organization can be a big undertaking. You’ll need to develop new practices and procedures to minimize the costs of incident coordination. You’ll need to create a retrospective process that encourages continuous learning. You’ll need to shift culture to begin appreciating failure as an opportunity to grow. Your transition to the world of SRE will also require buy-in from all levels of your organization.