Keeping the Hive Alive & RTE exhaustion

*** Last-minute change due to a speaker falling ill. Niko has kindly stepped in. See updated description below. ***

Two exciting topics, two very experienced speakers and much networking opportunity. We are very much looking forward to the next DevOps Meetup Zurich.
Here's what's planned for the evening:
17:30 - 18:00 - Arrival and first drinks
18:00 - 18:45 - RTE exhaustion: Common traps, real-life experiences and what other roles can learn from them by Nikolaos Kaintantzis
18:45 - 19:30 - Keeping the Hive Alive: Metrics, Midnight Snacks, and 3 Years of Resilience by Adhi Sutandi
19:30 - 20:30 - Networking, Open Space & More drinks

RTE exhaustion: Common traps, real-life experiences and what other roles can learn from them
Preamble: While the focus is on the RTE role, the underlying patterns are transferable to other roles such as Scrum Masters, Product Managers or agile leaders – and can help organizations reflect on more sustainable ways of working.

As an RTE, have you ever wondered why you are the first to start working in the morning and still have work left at the end of the day?
RTEs often take on a wide range of responsibilities and are expected to create alignment, flow and continuous improvement across the ART. Working long hours can easily become the norm.
Spoiler alert: it does not have to be that way.
In this talk, the RTE role is used as a concrete example to explore common patterns that lead to exhaustion in agile environments. Based on six real-life situations, I show typical traps and how different people addressed them.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis
Nikolaos Kaintantzis works as a trainer, consultant and coach in agile projects. He is also a professional systemic coach and works with leaders.
Through many years of experience in the conception and development of complex software solutions involving multiple teams, he gained early exposure to challenges in large-scale agile environments.
In his recent work, he increasingly focuses on AI-native ways of working and their implications for roles, collaboration and leadership in agile environments.
Nikolaos Kaintantzis is a SAFe Fellow.

Keeping the Hive Alive: Metrics, Midnight Snacks, and 3 Years of Resilience
In the modern era of SRE, reliability is no longer a bonus—it is often a core feature of the product. End-user experience is paramount, but at what cost? How do our promises of "four/five nines" impact the "heroes in the background"—the poor engineers waking up at 3:00 AM?

Reflecting on my experience co-leading the on-call process and being one of the on-call engineers at Beekeeper for three years, I will share how we shifted from individual heroism to organizational resilience. We will explore how to build a culture where reliability doesn't come at the expense of mental health.

In this session, we will cover:

• The Human Factor: Why people and habits matter more than tools.
• The Framework: Implementing basic Incident Management and meaningful SLOs.
• The Culture: Transforming runbooks and post-mortems into tools for learning, not blame.

Adhi Sutandi
With 8 years of experience in DevOps, I describe myself as a true DevOps generalist and an advocate for GitOps and Infrastructure as Code. I love diving into all areas of the stack, from fleet provisioning and secrets management to Observability and K8s. I’m also a big believer in the power of Open Source. When I’m not on-call or optimizing CI/CD pipelines, I am an avid half-marathon runner, a badminton player, and a board game enthusiast.

Many thanks to our sponsors:

• Catering Sponsor: DevOpsDays Zurich https://www.devopsdays.ch/
• Location Sponsor: Digicomp https://www.digicomp.ch/