Talks and Writing

Selected talks and writing.

• ‘The Worst Issue You Ever Dealt With’, talk at CfgMgtCamp 2025, Ghent. [https://requisitevariety.net/worstissuetalk.pdf]
• ‘Managing Critical State: Distributed Consensus for Reliability’ in the book Site Reliability Engineering, published by O’Reilly (2016). [tinyurl.com/yabmlatq]
• ‘What breaks our systems: A taxonomy of black swans’ talk, LISA 2018, and SREcon Americas 2019 keynote. [tinyurl.com/ydg7hzbf]
• ‘Cascading Failures in Distributed Systems’, InfoQ, 2020. [https://tinyurl.com/bdff39rj]
• ‘A Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day at Slack, Slack Engineering Blog, 2020. [https://tinyurl.com/2p8jhjau]
• ‘The Case of the Recursive Resolvers’, Slack Engineering Blog, 2021 (with Rafael Elvira). [https://tinyurl.com/2p86y37z]
• ‘You’ve Lost that Process Feeling: Some Lessons from Resilience Engineering’, SREcon 2021 (with Dr. David Woods). [https://tinyurl.com/46ujm8tp]
• ‘Managing systems in an age of dynamic complexity: How we went from being astronauts to being mission control, QCon 2020. [https://tinyurl.com/4dtc9w3y]
• Open-source self-guided workshop on loadshedding and load management. https://github.com/lauralifts/loadmgt-workshop