One on One SRE
summary
Describes two programs: 1:1 incident debrief and 1:1 SRE outreach that run as short guided interviews (markdown agenda, private docs) to collect personal incident stories after GitHub’s outage caused by a bad optic, misordered cable unplugging, and a split‑brain that left databases accepting conflicting writes. Interviewers spoke with 34 people, captured surprises (many didn’t know DB criticality), surfaced remediation items (add fiber links, remove CI dependency), logged learnings, and recorded when people did or missed self‑care.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:35trauma: extreme stress that overwhelms a person's ability to cope
- 3:51insufficient guard rails
- 7:39unknown unknowns
- 10:52The 1:1 Incident Debrief
- 11:43informed consent
- 13:41what was your role in the incident?
- 15:27how long did you work on the incident?
- 16:32were you able to get the support you needed?
- 16:58do you feel that the incident was preventable?
- 18:42what actions do you feel good about?
- 19:16what do you think could have been better?
- 19:50what did you learn from this incident?
- 20:58what do you think we can do to prevent reoccurrence?
- 21:43did our tools and documentation serve you well?
- 22:53did you practice self-care during this process?
- 24:41can you think of anyone else we should talk to?
- 25:31spanning tree
- 26:57deviant behavior
- 28:06How can I, an individual contributor, impact reliability at organizational scale?
