A Slightly Noobish SRE

In light of recent events that occurred during my most recent sprint, I'm going to break my post into two parts. The first will be a wonderful and meaningful story of an aspiring SRE and his triumph over his the industry and part 2 will be my first couple sprints. In case you haven't guessed already, the last part of my first statement might not have been entirely accurate and here's why. Yesterday I committed my code for this weeks sprint and in doing so, managed to kick off a chain of events which eventually went on to completely brick our whole Module. After discovering this and getting hit with a thorough reality check, I spent the next couple hours figuring out what went wrong and how I can prevent it from happening in the future. Part 1 It begins with an improper understanding of code committing "procedures". I say procedures with the quotes because we don't have any actual documented procedures for committing. If they did exist, the procedure wou...

I've been thinking about what I wanted to cover in this post since my initial post last week and it turns out that I have quite a bit to cover for my first "real post". I've decided to do something different. It occurred to me that I should give a quick overview of my life IT. For fun, I'm going to attempt this part using a mix of Powershell and pseudo code. Please keep in mind that this will likely look very shitty as I'm not quite sure how to format code in a blog post. Anyways, here we go.. myCareer.ps1 ################################# ##   Functions ################################# $Me = @(Location="Menomonie, WI", Smart="Yes", Quirk="Horrible ADD", [int]Focus="0",  Motivated="Yes", StartYear="2007", College="No", ITSkills="0") $College = @ (goTo="Yes", withdraw="No") $time = @ ( ) $timeInIT = @ ( ) function badDecisionMaking { if($Me.colleg...

As of today, I've been a SRE for one month now. I'd like to start by saying that this first post and probably the next few, will not be very technically oriented. While I've published a little bit of code to the prod environment, the majority of my time these first four weeks has been spent learning the architecture of our infrastructure inch by inch. It's been a humbling experience to an extent. When I realized just how big my environment spans, I also realized that this would not be a quick or easy excursion. However, after a few weeks of research and whiteboard sessions, I finally had a good handle on our architecture. The next struggle was learning what a Site Reliability Engineer actually does. Not only that, but what the workflow should be, what should I be working on, what are the priority levels. To quote the great movie 'Office Space': "What would you say, you do here?". Admittedly, I'm still figuring this part at this point but I have...