SF Reliability Engineering - May Talks

Doors at 6pm and ID required in the lobby. We're starting the talks at 6:30pm. Food and drinks provided.

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We're always looking for 20-30 minute technical talks (and 5-8 minute lightning talks) relating to the very broad field of Reliability Engineering. Get in touch with the organizers if you'd like to present!

Important check-in details for Twitter:

1. Bring your photo ID. This is required by building security during the check-in process.

2. We will begin checking people in at 6:00pm. Check-in closes at 6:30pm, so please arrive on time!

(If you arrive after 6:30pm, you may message the organizers on Meetup.com and we will do our best to get you into the event. However, please note that we are unable to check-in any attendees after 6:45pm)

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Talk 1: Meryl Charleston

Title: Integration Testing

Summary: We'll walk through different kinds of testing and how they differ from integration testing, common problems with it, why it's useful and tools and frameworks. It'll be valuable for people hoping to increase their teams' test coverage.

Bio: I'm a Software Engineer at Twitter where I do automated integration testing for the Timelines Infrastructure team. When I'm not looking for new ways to break timelines, I'm usually playing ultimate frisbee or being disappointed by the white sox!

Talk 2: Issa Ashwash

Title: More is better than one

Summary: This story will talk about the smooth (read: horrendously bumpy) way we went from an ops team of me, pre-coffee me, and late-night expletive-laden me to a growing operations team of 4, bringing onboard a junior hire, a mid-level hire, and a specialist lead with the hopes of complimenting skill-sets and meeting the needs of our larger team and company. I'll highlight lessons learned along that path, touching on hiring, on-boarding, productivity gains, and personal improvements required to grow into a managerial role.

Bio: Issa runs the tech-operations team at Area 1 Security, which focuses on stopping targeted phishing attacks. Our team focuses on infrastructure, build, and test automation. Born and raised in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, Issa's past lives were spent running operations for a WISP and various stints engineering SaaS products, including BitSight. When he's not busy regretting life choices such as a us-east-1-heavy deployment, you'll find Issa and his wife chasing after their 2 kids in one of San Mateo's parks.

Talk 3: Michael Kehoe

Summary: SRE teams can sometimes run into periods of time where they have staff burnout, technical debt or poor reliability. As SRE’s, we’re programmed to keep fighting through the issues, when sometimes it’s best to step back, assess the situation; and ask for help to put the team back on a successful pathway. This talk will discuss three separate experiences where teams needed some extra help to stabilize their services and oncall. We’ll discuss how to identify struggling teams; get the right assistance; and build a strategy for the team to succeed.

Bio: Michael Kehoe is a Staff SRE at LinkedIn who works on building scalable monitoring infrastructure, reliability principles and incident management. Michael previously interned at NASA Ames on their PhoneSat project. Michael's key interests lie in network engineering and automation.