Why I Started Writing This

This is a small note rather than an essay, because every reasonable publication should have one and because I want anyone who lands here for the first time to know what they are looking at before they invest the time.

My name is Anya Petrova. I have been a Site Reliability Engineer for eleven years. I have worked at a streaming company, a payments company, a fintech you have used, and — for a brief, regrettable summer — a Series A whose product turned out to be a wrapper around an OpenAI API call. I live in Vancouver. I carry a pager.

I started writing here because I wanted a place to think out loud about the parts of the SRE job that don't fit in conference talks. The talks are usually about the technical part — the new tracing tool, the migration pattern, the architectural decision. The talks are good. I have given some. They are not the whole job, and they are not the part that, eleven years in, I find the most interesting.

What I find most interesting now is the quiet part. The runbook that is technically correct but no longer matches the system. The post-mortem that says all the right words and somehow gets someone fired anyway. The Tuesday afternoon when you kill a node on purpose and learn that the autoscaler you were proud of has been silently broken for three months. The 3:47 a.m. page for a service that, by the time you boot your laptop, has already healed itself. The small grief of deleting a monolith you knew, line by line, in exchange for a system you can no longer hold in one head.

I am going to write about all of these, slowly, one piece at a time, on most Tuesdays. The posts will be longer than is fashionable. They will not have a TLDR. They will sometimes change their mind in the middle, because I sometimes change my mind in the middle. There will be very few listicles. There will be no checklists you could have found elsewhere.

If that sounds like something you might want in your inbox once a week, the subscribe form is on the homepage. If not, that is fine, and I am grateful you read this far either way.

A few small notes on the format:

• Comments here happen by email reply. I read every one. The best disagreements sometimes become their own essay, with permission.
• This publication is free and will stay free. There is a tip jar on the homepage if anything I write here is ever worth a coffee to you.
• I do not run ads. I do not run sponsorships. I have a day job; this is what I do after the day job is done.

That is everything. Welcome. I am glad you are here.

— Anya