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Is it worth the time?

My favourite web-comic is xkcd.com. And probably the most useful comic is this one:

Don't forget the time you spend finding the chart to look up what you save. And the time spent reading this reminder about the time spent. And the time trying to figure out if either of those actually make sense. Remember, every second counts toward your life total, including these right now.

There’s loads of great comics there – literally thousands now. This one has stuck with me for a few years now and should be on the cubicle wall of every DevOps or Site Reliability Engineer as a useful aide-memoire.

I’m a big fan of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), but I confess that my appreciation is still developing. I think I took it for granted that I understood it intuitively when I first came across it last year while we were establishing the team to build the analytics platform at the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet. But I didn’t really understand it fully. SRE has a much bigger impact on the whole development lifecycle than I realised – in a good way – and the last month has been a bit of an eye opener learning more about it. SRE is much more profound and sophisticated approach, and if you have time, check out this video from Google Cloud Next ’19 in March.

There are also two great free books on SRE from Google:
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