Google SRE NY Tech Talk

Google SRE NYC proudly announces our first Tech Talk event for 2024.
We are very excited to present this event in partnership with Rootly!

The in-person only event will take place on Wednesday, Feb 7th 2024 at 6 PM at our Chelsea Markets office in NYC. The doors will open at 5:30 pm.

We invite you to join us for an hour of short talks on Site Reliability and DevOps topics with an opportunity to meet and talk with fellow engineers over light snacks followed by an off-campus Happy Hour immediately after the event (pls pre-register for the Happy Hour).

Agenda:

**Ashley Sawatsky - Senior Reliability & Incident Response Advocate @ rootly.com**
“Fake ‘till you make it: Get the most out of incident simulations ”
Palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy...sound like your first on-call shift?
One of the biggest challenges in incident response work, especially for newer SREs, is the lack of safe spaces to fail. Incident simulations can be an effective way to take the terror out of that first on-call shift, but they take careful planning. In this talk, I’ll explore different types of simulations (from tabletops to full-on realistic mock incidents), how and when to utilize them, and how to make sure you get the most out of them.

Ashley Sawatsky is an expert in incident management and communication, with a focus on the SaaS world. In her 6+ years of experience building and scaling Shopify's incident response program, she focused on bridging the technical aspects of SRE with the incident response processes across other response teams like Legal, PR, Customer Support, and Executive stakeholders. Now, she's Rootly's Reliability and Incident Response Advocate, where she engages with the SRE and incident response communities, and consults with customers from the world's leading tech companies—like Canva, Figma, NVIDIA, and more—on their incident response strategies. She's also mom to Bowie, the world's coolest 6 year old, and Whiskey the pug.

Mattie Toia - Engineering Director, Production Platform Infrastructure @ Shopify
"We've Done Everything Right. But Bad Things Keep Happening and Now What?"
While we all can find places to improve, this talk will discuss how we can respond when bad things happen despite our implementation of many if not all of the recommended reliability practices. We'll talk about reasons why this might be the case, and then we'll examine some possible approaches to addressing them.

Mattie Toia is Director for all Infrastructure at Shopify and oversees the teams building and maintaining the foundational platforms that allow Shopify to scale for 24/7 global commerce big and small. They worked with the company for the past three Black Fridays, ensuring the scale and success for merchants during the highest peaks of Shopify's business.
Prior to Shopify, Mattie was a director of SRE at Google working on GCP, specifically observability, APIs, and CRE. Before that, they had a range of experiences spending nearly a decade at the company working in organizations from Storage, to Corp Eng, to Developer Infrastructure -- all together spending just under 10 years there.
Mattie currently resides in New York, NY with their partner, two daughters, and two smallest, newest family additions: a pair of kittens!

Sami Meharzi - SRE, Big Table @ Google
"Mechanical systems -> Biological systems: How managing infrastructure changes with scale and so how should we approach it"

When starting, software systems are similar to mechanical systems where functionality and changes are fairly predictable. However, with more automation and dynamic interactions, software systems start behaving more like biological systems/ecosystems. This sometimes leads to relatively small things having crazy unintended consequences and large things not quite having as much impact as one would hope. This stems from the full ecosystem and how everything (eventually) has some impact on everything else. With this in mind, there are approaches to solving problems at scale that would not make sense otherwise and some approaches that are detrimental.

Sami is an SRE for GCP Bigtable. His previous roles include: Production Engineer @ Meta for Instagram Machine Learning; DevOps/Sre @ ArcherDX (now Integrated DNA Technologies); SRE @ Nordstrom and DevOps Engineer @ SomaLogic

Our Tech Talks series are focused on professional development and networking: no recruiters, sales or press are allowed. Google is committed to providing a harassment-free and inclusive conference experience for everyone, and all participants must follow our Event Community Guidelines.
Event space is limited! A reservation is required to attend. Reserve your spot today and share the event details with your SRE/DevOps friends 🙂