Viewing profile — achiang

I was a sysadmin (at uni, in the early 2000s) and I am an SRE today (at Google). The two jobs are nothing alike, at all, whatsoever. Sysadmins are support roles. Their functional r…

It has been 10 years since I left Canonical (on good terms), but what popey describes (hi popey) about the intentional lack of human review in the Snap store sounds very Canonical …

Full body scans are a common preventative measure in Taiwan. My parents (expats, living in the US for over 50 years) flew back and got routine scans (MRI, PET, CT) in February for …

Real world usage is you only get to use ~70% of the stated range on a road trip, so we're really talking about 350 miles of range, which is, as you say, what most people actually w…

You need to use the fully loaded cost of an employee when estimating opex savings, which includes health care costs, retirement funding, etc. Rule of thumb is that fully loaded cos…

Google SRE here. Point of clarification on "losing skills" by not being oncall enough. Google designs its SRE teams to scale sublinearly to the service, which means we're often res…

I haven't seen anyone recommend net/http yet, but that is the library that was recommended to me to read to get a sense for modern, idiomatic go.

As mentioned elsewhere, the worse bug was in upstream, unpatched gdm. It's been a very long time since I worked on a distro (former Canonical employee here) but every distro carrie…

The semantic tagging is nice, I might start incorporating that into my notes. On the overall topic of meeting notes, I picked this up as a new skill in the past year and it's been …

The politics is exactly the point of my comment. The professional way to write a blog post like this is from your own perspective. Identify the proximate cause (the peer), name nam…

Google networking SRE here (my team runs ns[1-4].google.com among other services). Regardless of original intent, the blog doesn't land well with me. It could have provided the bac…

The design you propose is stateful, and if you read the chapter closely, you can see we spend a lot of effort to make things stateless. The main thing I wanted to respond to in thi…

> (You will notice that people like Google and Cloudflare skillfully respond with only one record with a 5 minute TTL. That is so the behavior of the browser is well defined, but i…

I don't have a platform the size that the recoil author has. That's the difference.

So here's a nuanced view I'm sure will get downvoted into the ground: both FB and the employee were right, but along different dimensions, and this outcome was not only inevitable,…

Accurate headline but incorrect analysis. Big Tech pays like sports, not because of average salary levels, but because of the spread between highest and lowest paid engineers. Let'…

They are truly standard behavioral questions that you can't really prepare for, other than thinking about what you did in various scenarios. "Tell me about a time you had to resolv…

I joined Google last year, hired directly as a manager. Germane to this thread, I'm in my early 40s. At Google, the bar is that you are expected to be able to contribute as an equi…

All managers in Google (engineering and non-engineering) are encouraged to take a 2-day immersive course. There's a course for "experienced manager, but new to Google" and a course…

Thanks, you made my day. I'm a Google network SRE, but perhaps I'll get new business cards saying "cold potato engineer".

Nice article, I'd be curious to know if/how their engine abstracts the complexity behind multi-currency transactions, or whether they rely on the accounting model to handle multi-c…

Google+ failed, but it begat Google Photos which is not a failure. obDisclosure: I'm a Googler, but joined way after G+ both launched and failed.

Google SRE doesn't have magical incident response beans that we hoard from the rest of the world. What makes Google SRE institutionally strong is that we have senior executive supp…