July 2021 Summaries

In the podcast episode of "Break Things on Purpose," Paul Marsicovetere, a Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Formidable, shares his journey from a student in Melbourne to a prominent role in cloud engineering in Canada, highlighting his accidental transition into Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). He discusses significant career milestones, such as migrating to AWS for scalability improvements and the challenges faced during this process, including a two-day intense migration period. Paul emphasizes the importance of learning from failures, mentoring, and building trust within teams. He recounts incidents at Benevity, such as a site outage caused by incompatible Nginx rewrite rules and a complex issue involving AWS's EFS, underscoring the unpredictable nature of cloud systems. Paul also shares his approach to mentoring, stressing the value of documentation and learning from all levels of experience. Currently at Formidable, he works on innovative projects while balancing experimentation with reliability, reflecting the dynamic challenges and growth opportunities within the SRE domain.

In the "Break Things on Purpose" podcast episode, Taylor Dolezal, a Senior Developer Advocate at HashiCorp, discusses chaos engineering, incident response, and retrospectives, focusing on learning from failures in distributed systems. Dolezal recounts experiences from working at Disney Studios, where he faced DNS outages and challenges in standardizing application stacks, emphasizing the importance of implementing Kubernetes for consistency and smoother operations. He shares insights into dealing with Rabbit MQ issues and highlights the significance of chaos engineering in improving system reliability by simulating failures and validating backups. The conversation also touches on the value of learning and communication with product teams to enhance understanding and troubleshoot effectively, advocating for a proactive and curious approach to problem-solving and advocating for chaos engineering as a valuable practice in both technical and workflow contexts.