In the podcast episode "Break Things on Purpose," Mandi Walls, a DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, reflects on her extensive career in technology, focusing on the evolution of chaos engineering and reliability practices. Walls shares insights from her early experiences at AOL, where she dealt with monolithic systems and the challenges of scaling and reliability, contrasting them with the more flexible, modern cloud environments. She emphasizes the importance of empathy, sharing, and post-incident reviews in fostering a collaborative and resilient DevOps culture. The conversation also touches on PagerDuty's tools for improving incident response and reliability, highlighting the integration with Rundeck for automation and the introduction of features like service graphs to enhance operational insights. Walls advocates for a holistic approach to monitoring and incident management, encouraging organizations to embrace learning from failures to drive continuous improvement.