The Multiverse of IT Storytelling

Leon Adato, a Principal Technical Marketing Engineer at Cribl and host of the Technically Religious podcast, was featured on the ShipTalk podcast at SREday NYC 2026, where he shared insights about navigating failure and uncertainty in complex systems through lessons drawn from unexpected sources like the movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Adato emphasized that failures, whether due to obsolete tools or vendor issues, should be viewed as opportunities for teams to rethink their systems and improve architecture, rather than as personal failures. He advocates for transparency and honesty in addressing glitches, which leads to healthier engineering cultures and stronger teams. By comparing the challenges faced by SREs to those encountered by Miles Morales in the film, Adato highlights the importance of staying calm, refocusing, and trusting one's experience during outages, reinforcing that the true measure of success lies in how engineers respond to inevitable technological changes and failures.