Humans of Reliability

In this episode of Humans of Reliability , Ryan McDonald is joined by Mark Quigley , Head of Platform Engineering at 90 , for a conversation that cuts through the noise around developer productivity metrics and AI. Mark dives deep into how teams can measure what matters—without falling into the trap of turning every measure into a target. He shares how tools like Developer NPS, DORA metrics, and b...

Last year, over 89% of companies claimed to have adopted platform engineering. And, in the past month, LLMs have been disrupting how we think about software development. In this context, Kaspar, asks if the role of Site Reliability Engineers is being obsolete as we know it. Kaspar argues that while SREs aren’t going anywhere, their responsibilities are evolving—fast. We talk about: The need for th...

Dan Slimmon is an incident management veteran who's worked at Etsy, HashiCorp, and now leads consulting and training on pragmatic, non-bureaucratic incident response.  In this episode, Dan shares his philosophy on "scientific incident response," the importance of hypothesis-driven troubleshooting, and why incidents should be seen as normal in complex systems.  We also explore: Why a...

Mariano , Staff Product Manager at Vercel , explains why serverless architectures are hitting unexpected limits—they’re too fast.  The industry has spent millions optimizing serverless for speed, but AI workloads are changing the game. In the AI realm, slower execution often leads to better results. The challenge? Paying for all that idle compute time while waiting for AI responses.  Mariano expla...

In this episode, we sit down with Adriana Villela , Principal DevRel at Dynatrace and OpenTelemetry contributor to break down how observability impacts reliability.  We dive into what contributes to SRE burnout and how managers can create psychologically safer spaces for responders.  Adriana also shares her perspective on AI as an observability-buddy to navigate incidents.  SHOW LINKS: Video and t...

In this episode, we sit down with Sean Goedecke , Staff Software Engineer at GitHub, to discuss where LLMs fit into real-world development.  Sean shares how he’s using LLMs how he’s drawing the line for AI-assistance in the codebases he manages—though, as he says, this might all change by next summer.  Sean also weighs in on how LLMs could assist SREs during outages—especially when you’re only hal...

In this episode of Humans of Reliability , we sit down with Steve McGhee , Reliability Advocate at Google , to discuss his journey from early SRE work to advocating for reliability best practices.  Steve shares fascinating stories from his time at Google, the challenges of implementing SRE in enterprises, and what people often misunderstand about the discipline.  He also offers valuable insights o...

What does it take to lead service delivery at a company experiencing massive growth?  Hannah Hammonds , Service Delivery Lead at Prolific , shares her journey from an IT networking apprentice to a tech leader shaping reliability and incident response.  We discuss the evolving role of service delivery, the power of mentorship, and how confidence transforms careers. Plus, we debate hot dogs, spoiler...

What happens when a Google-trained SRE joins a fast-moving e-commerce company?  Gastón Rial Saibene , SRE Lead at Boozt.com , joins Humans of Reliability to talk about adapting reliability practices for different company sizes, the limits of SLOs, and the importance of automation.  We also dive into decision-making, his favorite books, and—just for fun—whether he’d survive a zombie apocalypse. Tun...

🎙️ Humans of Reliability : Keeping systems up and the lights on isn’t just about technology—it’s about the people behind it. In this episode, we’re thrilled to chat with Nuno Tomás, founder of IsDown.app , a vendor outage monitoring tool transforming how teams handle third-party incidents. Nuno shares his journey from software engineer to entrepreneur, the pivotal 4 a.m. moment that inspired Isdow...