Shows
Finite By Clarity: B2B Marketing Podcast for Tech, Software & SaaS#194 - Features Are Back: How B2B Messaging Is Changing for Sceptical Buyers | Adam Frank, VP Marketing at RootlyA billboard in New York reads “Business software that doesn’t suck.” It’s bold and memorable, and according to Adam Frank, it’s exactly the kind of message that makes a sceptical buyer more sceptical, not less.For years, B2B marketers have been told to lead with why and sell benefits, not features. Adam has found the opposite with some of technology’s most sceptical buyers. In this episode of the Finite Podcast, Jodi Norris sits down with Adam to unpack how to win over buyers who’ve heard every claim before. They discuss when fe...
2026-10-2620 min
The GEO ShowGoogle Just Made YouTube Ads ConversationalWelcome to The GEO Show, the briefing on Generative Engine Optimization and AI visibility. Brought to you by GEOforge.In this solo roundup, Paris Childress, founder of Hop AI and co-founder of GEOforge, leads with Google's new Business Agent for YouTube ads, then covers seven more stories: Criteo's ChatGPT Ads data, ZenMedia, a machine relations citation index, Google's developer knowledge agent skill, Athena HQ, Ahrefs, and free GEO audit tools.In this episode:📢 ChatGPT Ads crosses 2,000 brands through CriteoCriteo says more than 2,000 brands now advertise on ChatGPT through its integration, which has exp...
2026-09-2613 min
Humans of ReliabilityYour next IDP is a library of agent skills w/ PostHogWhat happens when AI agents become direct users of your infrastructure?Michael Kutsch, Staff SRE and Team Lead for Cloud Foundations at PostHog, is building toward an agent-native platform. His team gives agents an index to focused infrastructure context, then packages repeatable work as skills that can call deterministic scripts when reliability and governance matter.Michael joins Sylvain Kalache to explain why this technical model depends on genuine engineering autonomy. They discuss how PostHog's product teams contribute directly to infrastructure, how layered documentation improved agent-generated pull requests, where agents help during incidents, and why the...
2026-08-3131 minHumans of ReliabilityHow getting hired as an SRE is changing in the AI eraAI is rewriting the reliability-engineering career path from the first application onward. James Duffy, Principal SRE at Fabric, explains why applications are becoming harder to distinguish and why interviews must stop rewarding output and start revealing production judgment.He explains how he replaced generation-focused exercises with a review of deliberately flawed AI code and how job seekers can use AI for skeptical feedback without surrendering their own voice.The interview follows that path beyond hiring. James argues that companies abandoning junior roles are creating a future talent gap, and that continuous learning is the...
2026-08-1824 min
BestBlogsEP142 · 贾扬清再创业、淘宝主播 Agent 骨架、田渊栋谈递归自进化 · 08-08 早报章节时间戳00:00 开场00:37 精讲：贾扬清在科技早知道，回溯从 Caffe 到 Lepton AI 的演变历程02:47 精讲：大淘宝技术拆解主播 Agent 的 Harness 工程与五层纵深防御05:41 精讲：田渊栋在晚点聊，谈 RSI 自进化是平滑曲线还是阶梯式跳跃07:49 速览：小红书翻译评测、Cursor 重写 GPU、参数化 Memory、TutorMoments、InfoQ 趋势10:07 补充阅读：Rootly 代码审查、字节 5 万亿参数、宇树 IPO、vLLM 推理、人的因素11:35 结语★ 精讲一 | 贾扬清：我所经历的「人工智能已死」到「AI 颠覆世界」的数年巨变丨串台「声东击西」S10E24 [播客]00:37｜来自 What's Next｜科技早知道贾扬清刚官宣第二家创业公司 Intent Lab——他的上一家 Lepton AI 第二年就实现盈利，随后被英伟达收购。这期与声东击西的串台里，他回溯从 2005 年到今天的 AI 演变：读研时业界普遍判定人工智能是一个历史概念，他靠一个快递盒送来的 GPU 做出 Caffe，又先后走过 Google Brain、Meta 和阿里。对想理解一位顶级 AI 科学家如何在每波浪潮中重新下注的读者，这段亲历复盘信息密度很高。★ 精讲二 | 淘宝主播 Agent 的 Harness 工程实战02:47｜来自 大淘宝技术大淘宝技术这篇把主播 Agent 的工程骨架讲得很细。多数公开 Harness 实践验证的是单机个人助手场景，而直播场景错误即时生效、面向公众、代价是真金白银。文章把 Harness 形式化为六元组，落到框架与业务分离的分层架构：记忆走 Hologres、技能走 GitLab、会话走 MySQL，逻辑统一而物理分治。再用 Reducer 管理上下文、五层纵深防御保安全，并用 DAG 全局规划替代 ReAct 单步，撑住长程可恢复任务。★ 精讲三 | 178: 与田渊栋聊 RSI：模型自进化如何到来？ [播客]05:41｜来自 晚点聊 LateTalk田渊栋联合创立的 Recursive Superintelligence 估值已超 46 亿美元。这期晚点聊围绕 RSI（递归自进化）的核心悬念展开：智能提升是平滑曲线，还是阶梯式跳跃——后者意味着率先自进化的公司会把对手越甩越远。6 月初他们放出小规模成果，验证 AI 能自动化提升性能与 Infra；田渊栋判断 Anthropic 的长文更多是提效，还算不上递归自进化。速览07:49 更多值得关注的内容· 小红书联合浙大复旦提出首个「文化有效性」翻译评测，入选 ICML 2026 — 小红书技术 REDtech· InfoQ 文化与方法趋势报告 - 2026 — InfoQ· TutorMoments：AI 导师知道何时该帮忙、何时该收手吗？ — Hugging Face - Blog· 从胡言乱语到精准改代码：我是如何让 AI 读懂老项目的 — 腾讯技术工程· 参数化 Memory 漫谈（纯干货） — 阿里技术· 103μs 降到 18μs 背后，Cursor 为何剑指英伟达，重写 GPU？ — AI 科技评论· 应对关键网络能力的新前沿 — OpenAI News补充阅读10:07 今天额外值得一读的几条· Rootly 取消小 PR 规则，智能体 AI 改变代码审查经济学 — InfoQ· 2026 年文化与方法趋势：AI 工程中人的因素 — InfoQ· 宇树 IPO 的财富盛宴，注定只有少数人赚到 — 腾讯科技· 晚点独家丨字节讨论训超 5 万亿参数模型，张一鸣：不蒸馏、别被 Coding 这种短期热点影响 — 晚点 LatePost· vLLM 内部剖析：高吞吐 LLM 推理系统的结构 - Aleksa Gordić — Hacker News - Newest: 「LLM」相关链接· 本期早报在线阅读：https://www.bestblogs.dev/explore/brief/2026-08-08· 贾扬清：我所经历的「人工智能已死」到「AI 颠覆世界」的数年巨变丨串台「声东击西」S10E24 [播客]：https://www.bestblogs.dev/podcast/de4c8de7a· 淘宝主播 Agent 的 Harness 工程实战：https://www.bestblogs.dev/article/f9c0d7aecd· 178: 与田渊栋聊 RSI：模型自进化如何到来？ [播客]：https://www.bestblogs.dev/podcast/83055fe2d· 小红书联合浙大复旦提出首个「文化有效性」翻译评测，入选 ICML 2026：https://www.bestblogs.dev/article/d6bac50ef9· InfoQ 文化与方法趋势报告 - 2026：https://www.bestblogs.dev/article/0d0d94f508· TutorMoments：AI 导师知道何时该帮忙、何时该收手吗？：https://www.bestblogs.dev/article/123a1d6fed· 从胡言乱语到精准改代码：我是如何让 AI 读懂老项目的：
2026-08-0812 min
The Growth RoundupHow Rootly Won the World’s Most Demanding Engineering Teams: Lessons on enterprise sales at scaleThe conversation covers the early customer acquisition journey, the process of validating the idea, pricing strategy, enterprise sales, scaling customer acquisition, hiring and leadership lessons, and retention and customer success. It provides insights into sales strategies, customer acquisition channels, and the importance of customer engagement and retention. The conversation covers topics related to reliability as a feature, the importance of building a boring product, customer uptime and reliability, early stage challenges, growth strategies and sales outreach, balancing AI and human touch, sales strategy and customer behavior, and fundraising and investor relations. The discussion provides valuable insights into the challenges...
2026-07-291h 02
High Output: The Future of EngineeringAI Fails Like We DoTen minutes into our conversation, Sylvain Kalache drafted me into a role-play. “Let’s say I’m the SRE and William, you are the developer,” he said. Production is down. He runs git blame on the broken microservice and finds my name. “Hey William, how about you come sit next to me, or let’s jump in a Slack channel — maybe you can help me solve it.” That’s the oldest move in incident response: find the author, sit them next to the problem, let what’s in their head speed up the debugging. And git blame will still find the author fine...
2026-07-2534 minHumans of ReliabilityYour AI agents are lost: give them a graph w/ Anthony Alcaraz (AWS)The race to build capable AI agents often focuses on model intelligence. Anthony Alcaraz argues that the harder, more durable problem is context: giving agents the right information, relationships, tools, and constraints at the moment they need them.Anthony is a Senior AI/ML Portfolio Growth Manager at AWS and co-author of O'Reilly's Agentic GraphRAG. He explains how graph-based architectures can improve retrieval, memory, planning, and multi-step reasoning while capturing the tribal knowledge that conventional enterprise systems leave behind.The conversation also looks beyond architecture. Anthony describes self-improving agent systems, feedback loops that connect technical...
2026-07-2124 minHumans of ReliabilityAI vs. AI: From Alert Fatigue to Agentic CybersecurityAI is giving attackers the ability to scale phishing, discover vulnerabilities, and build increasingly autonomous malware. But it is also helping defenders investigate alerts, eliminate noise, and respond before threats become incidents.Nir Soudry, Head of R&D at 7AI, joins Humans of Reliability to explore the rise of agentic cybersecurity. He explains why humans must remain accountable for AI decisions, how security teams can introduce agents gradually, and why adopting AI should be treated as an ongoing partnership rather than a simple software installation.We also discuss AI-generated code and its impact on reliability, 7...
2026-07-1525 minHumans of ReliabilityStop shipping features for a quarter, it might save you w/ Monday.com co-founderWhen incidents pile up fast enough, every part of the company bleeds: support is fielding angry customers, AEs are on apology calls, and engineering is burning cycles on retrospectives instead of shipping. For Eran Kampf (VP of Engineering at Twingate) where the product is the network, that was the moment he made a call most engineering leaders won't: stop all feature work for a quarter and fix reliability.In this episode, Eran walks through what lead to that decision, why best-in-class engineering practices (full test coverage, Terraform provisioning, comprehensive monitoring) turned out to be just...
2026-07-0629 minHumans of Reliability"Hey Claude, where's my database?": How an AI agent nuked production w/ Alexey Grigorev"Hey Claude, where's my database?" The answer came back: "Oh, sorry, your database is gone." Alexey Grigorev, founder of DataTalks.Club and creator of the Zoomcamp courses that have taught data and ML engineering to over 100,000 people, knows Terraform well enough to cover it in his curriculum. That didn't stop a chain of small, reasonable-sounding decisions from ending in an AI agent running terraform destroy against his live production database.
2026-06-1632 minHumans of ReliabilityEvery pilot is ready for engine failure: are your engineers? w/ Hamed Silatani (Uptime Labs)Every pilot who's never had an engine failure is still ready for one. The same can't be said for most software engineers facing their first major incident. Hamed Silatani, co-founder and CEO of Uptime Labs, and former Head of Reliability Engineering at IG Group, has spent two decades watching engineers learn incident response the hard way: alone, under pressure, with no training. A moment in a hospital delivery room, where a team of nurses responded to a crisis with clockwork precision, crystallized what he'd long suspected: IT spends heavily on tooling and process but almost no...
2026-05-2828 minHumans of ReliabilityLLM Observability: Lessons From MLOps w/ Maria Vechtomova (Cauchy)For nine years, Maria Vechtomova was shouting about monitoring. Nobody cared, until LLMs arrived. As co-founder of Cauchy, Databricks MVP, and one of the most followed voices in MLOps, Maria has watched the field evolve from hand-built experiment trackers to today's flood of observability tools, and her central claim might surprise you: globally, nothing has changed. The fundamentals are the same: track your code, data, and models so you can roll back when something breaks. What did change is the surface area. Tools, prompts, embeddings, agents, every component shifts behavior unpredictably, and business met...
2026-05-1420 min
Pink Signal — Tatiana MikhalevaAI SRE Joined My On-Call — A Beginner-Friendly Walkthrough of RootlyWhat an AI SRE actually does on call — a hands-on walkthrough of Rootly: how it observes, advises, and acts, with its four-level trust model. Narrated by an AI clone of the author's voice.
2026-05-1208 min
Tilt Engineering(AI Gen) Teaching AI to Read the Room: How We Built an Automated Incident ClassifierAfter 18 months and ~800 incidents, our Rootly classification fields were mostly empty, no one fills in six drop downs at 2am. This post walks through how Tilt built an automated incident classifier: a scheduled .NET pipeline that scrapes the Slack channel, sends the conversation to Claude, and writes back the cause, vendor, component, and team, while quietly backing off any field a human corrected.
2026-05-0121 minHumans of ReliabilityThe Golden Hour: Why the First 15 Minutes of an Incident Decide Everything w/ Gandhi M. N. Kumar (Twillio)Most incident response advice focuses on tools, alerts, and post-mortems. Gandhi Mathi Nathan Kumar, Principal Incident Commander at Twilio, with 14 years running calls that have pulled in up to 100 responders, argues the work that actually matters happens in the first 15 minutes. In this episode, Gandhi walks through what he calls the golden hour: the window where you decide whether you know what's broken, who belongs on the call, and whether to chase the root cause or reach for redundancy. He gets into why mitigation has to come before diagnosis, why customers trust your status page mo...
2026-04-2829 min
Braintrust by CortexRootly's Dan Sadler on why AI coding tools are driving more incidents and why reliability is the productCortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Dan Sadler, VP of Engineering at Rootly. Dan explains how Rootly treats reliability as a product feature rather than just a technical metric, and why culture might be the most impactful element of building reliable systems.Dan and Ganesh discuss weekly operational reviews that tie technical metrics back to user experience, how load testing and chaos engineering help Series A companies mature faster, and why dogfooding their own on-call product creates better engineering decisions. They also explore a concerning trend in Rootly's customer data showing that AI coding...
2026-04-2338 minHumans of ReliabilityFrom 600 to 6,000: Federating Incident Response w/ Cliff Snyder (ex-LinkedIn SRE)A centralized SRE team of 600 engineers as the first line of defense for every incident works - until the business asks you to spread that responsibility across 6,000. Cliff Snyder, senior SRE at Multimedia and a decade-long veteran of LinkedIn's SRE org, walks through the 18-month project to democratize incident response: replacing a patchwork of Jira, Google Docs, and in-house tooling with a purpose-built platform designed for engineers who may have never been on-call before. He gets into the tradeoffs that shaped the rollout — flexibility versus opinionation, exec pushback on even renaming "postmortem" to "retrospective," the repo...
2026-04-2226 minHumans of ReliabilityAI Didn't Change the Game, It Just Exposed Your Bottlenecks w/ Ganesh Datta (CTO, Cortex)Every engineering org says they want to improve reliability — but most can't even agree on what "good" looks like. Ganesh Datta, Co-Founder and CTO of Cortex, has spent the better part of a decade helping companies confront that gap. In this conversation, Ganesh makes the case that platform engineering and SRE are solving the same human problem — earning adoption through influence, not authority — and that the two teams belong on the same user journey. He breaks down why production readiness programs decay the moment you stop automating them, why clear service ownership is the foundation everything else depends...
2026-04-0930 min
Let's Table ThatClosing Talent in a Tough Market w/ Tonci Hockmann | Let's Table ThatIn this episode of Let’s Table That, Jazzy and Glaze sit down with Tonci, a seasoned recruiter who’s built teams across startups, scale-ups, and enterprise companies like Instacart, RBC, and now, Rootly.They break down what’s really happening in today’s tech talent market, from the rise of AI in hiring to why recruiting at scale is less about heroics and more about building repeatable processes. Tonci shares practical insights on closing candidates, scaling teams, and what actually separates great hiring from average hiring.You’ll hear:-What “recruiting at scale” really means-How AI is changing hiring (and wh...
2026-04-0856 min
Reliability RebelsEpisode 11: Sylvain KalacheAI agents are triaging incidents and writing runbooks- but are LLMs actually the right tool for operational work? Sylvain Kalache, Head of AI Labs at Rootly, shares research on where AI SRE tools add real value, where they fall apart, and what it means for operational maturity when humans only see the hardest problems. Guest: Sylvain Kalache, Head of AI Labs at Rootly (https://rootly.com). Show Notes Available at https://podcast.certomodo.io/sylvain-kalache.html.
2026-04-0854 minHumans of ReliabilityFear, Identity & Flaky Tests: AI in Reliability w/ Dana Lawson (CTO, Netlify)The self-healing systems that SREs have dreamed about for a decade aren't a distant promise anymore — they're already being built, and the biggest barrier left is cultural. Dana Lawson, CTO at Netlify, has spent over 25 years in the trenches of developer infrastructure, from sysadmin roots to running the platform that powers 5% of the internet. In this episode, Dana makes the case that the SRE/DevOps community's resistance to AI agents isn't really about the technology — it's about identity, control, and the fear of losing the expertise that defined a generation of engineers. She doesn't dismiss that f...
2026-03-3129 min
The Software Leaders Uncensored PodcastHow AI is TRANSFORMING Incident Management w/ Sylvain Kalache | Episode 185In this episode, host Steve Taplin interviews Sylvain Kalache, head of AI labs at Rootly AI, and shares insights on how AI is transforming incident management, the role of AI in reliability engineering, and leadership lessons in the era of GenAI. Discover how companies are leveraging AI to improve operational efficiency and the importance of human-centered leadership.
2026-03-3031 minHumans of ReliabilityThe Incident You Never Had: Deterministic Simulations w/ Will Wilson (Antithesis CEO)Most reliability engineering happens after something breaks. Will Wilson thinks that's the wrong place to be. As co-founder and CEO of Antithesis, the autonomous testing platform that just raised $105M in a Series A led by Jane Street, Will has spent years building the infrastructure to catch failure modes before they ever reach production. His starting point is uncomfortable: the testing practices most teams rely on are structurally incapable of finding the bugs that cause real incidents.In this episode, Will traces that argument from its origins at FoundationDB, where a small team used deterministic simulation to...
2026-03-1729 minHumans of ReliabilityBurnout Doesn't Ask Permission: Recognizing, Recovering, and Rebuilding w/ Stephen TownsendBurnout doesn't announce itself. For Stephen Townsend, SRE team lead and host of the Slight Reliability podcast, it crept in over months of mounting pressure on a massive transformation program, and announced itself overnight with an inability to sleep.In this episode, Stephen shares his personal burnout story with rare honesty: the physical symptoms he dismissed, the org structure that left him without autonomy, and the full year it took to recover.But this isn't just a cautionary tale. Stephen brings a practitioner's eye to what the industry can actually do differently, from optimal team...
2026-03-0431 minHumans of ReliabilityCode Is Cheap, Reliability Isn’t: Owning Production in the AI era w/ Swizec TellerCode has never been easier to write. With AI copilots and agentic coding tools, spinning up features feels almost effortless. But production systems don’t run on vibes, they run on reliability.In this episode of Humans of Reliability, Swizec Teller, author of the bestselling Scaling Fast, argues that writing code was never the hard part. The hard part is making it run. We talk about the “Feynman computer disease” of AI coding addiction, why babysitting agents may be the new productivity trap, and what SRE instinct really looks like when you’re debugging a distributed system at 2AM.
2026-02-1629 min
Adventures in DevOpsProject Yellow Brick Road: Creative, Practical, and Unconventional EngineeringShare Episode ⸺ Episode Sponsor: Rootly AI - https://dev0ps.fyi/rootlyai Paul Conroy, CTO at Square1, joins the show to prove that the best defense against malicious bots isn't always a firewall—sometimes, it’s creative data poisoning. Paul recounts a legendary story from the Irish property market where a well-funded competitor attempted to solve their "chicken and egg" problem by scraping his company's listings. Instead of waiting years for lawyers, Paul’s team fed the scrapers "Project Yellow Brick Road": fake listings that placed the British Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street in Dublin and the White House in County Cork...
2026-01-1650 minHumans of ReliabilityDemocratizing Reliability: Empowering Non-Devs with Dileshni Jayasinghe (commonsku)Many companies don’t invest in incident management until something goes wrong. commonsku took a different path.In this episode of Humans of Reliability, Sylvain sits down with Dileshni Jayasingha, VP of Technology at commonsku, to talk about what it really takes to introduce incident management in a mature, profitable SaaS that had never formalized it. From rolling out observability and incident tooling to practicing internal status updates before going public, Dileshni shares how her team built the right muscles before they were forced to.They also explore a less common — but increasingly powerful — idea: democr...
2026-01-1422 minHumans of Reliability99%+ Accuracy on a Moving Target: Model Deprecation and Reliability with Tomás Hernando Koffman (Not Diamond)Shipping systems powered by LLMs would be hard enough if the models stayed the same. But in reality, they don’t. Models get updated and deprecated at a pace traditional software wouldn’t. All while teams are still expected to hit reliability targets that look a lot like traditional SLAs.In this episode, Tomás Hernando Koffman, Co-founder of Not Diamond, breaks down what it really takes to reach 99%+ accuracy when the underlying model is a moving target. He explains why non-determinism, model churn, and compounding errors make LLM reliability fundamentally different from classical software. And why “good en...
2025-12-2230 min
Humans of ReliabilityThe Reality of GenAI in Production with Eduardo Ordax (AWS)GenAI demos are easy. Production is where everything breaks. In this episode, Eduardo Ordax, Principal GTM GenAI at AWS, breaks down what actually stops companies from shipping reliable AI systems, and why the real blockers have little to do with technology.We dig into the culture problems that slow down adoption, the endless cycle of experimentation, and why non-deterministic LLMs don’t fit neatly into traditional web-app architectures. Eduardo also shares what he’s seeing across industries: who’s genuinely succeeding with AI, the teams struggling to scale beyond prototypes, and why most jobs will evolve faster than p...
2025-12-1227 min
EnginearsAI-native On-Call + Incident Management I Rootly PodcastIf you're keen to share your story, please reach out to us!There's a lot of rage in the AI-SRE space right now and I was keen to get some of the big players on the show to get under the hood of what they're building and the areas of focus. Playing the same game but approaches from different angles.- Hacking and building with his co-founder pre "AI"- Their thinking and anti-patterns behind building a traditional SaaS business and how they are so customer-obsessed.- What it really...
2025-12-1049 minHumans of ReliabilityIt’s Never Different This Time: LLM Reliability Without the Hype with Julien SimonIn this episode, Julien Simon, longtime voice in the open-source ML world, reminds us that even in the era of GenAI, reliability fundamentals haven’t changed.Julien breaks down why calling “the same model” from different providers can produce wildly different results, how deployment choices introduce hidden variability, and why reliability teams need to think of LLM systems as distributed systems.He explains the growing gap between experimentation and production, the operational pitfalls of fast-moving open-source tooling, and why enterprises increasingly turn to open-weight models for performance, cost control, and deeper domain alignment.From t...
2025-11-1930 minHumans of ReliabilityYou Can’t Fix What You Don’t Measure: Observability in the Age of AI with Conor BronsdonOnly 50% of companies monitor their ML systems. Building observability for AI is not simple: it goes beyond 200 OK pings. In this episode, Sylvain Kalache sits down with Conor Brondsdon (Galileo) to unpack why observability, monitoring, and human feedback are the missing links to make large language model (LLM) reliable in production.Conor dives into the shift from traditional test-driven development to evaluation-driven development, where metrics like context adherence, completeness, and action advancement replace binary pass-fail checks. He also shares how teams can blend human-in-the-loop feedback, automated guardrails, and small language models to keep AI accurate, compliant, and...
2025-11-0531 minHumans of ReliabilityThe End of “Good Code”? AI, Throughput, and Reliability with CircleCI CTO Rob ZuberIs “good code” still the right measure of engineering success in an AI-driven world? In this episode of Humans of Reliability, Rob Zuber, CircleCI CTO, joins Sylvain to explore how coding assistants are reshaping developer workflows and changing what teams value.Rob shares what he’s seeing across CircleCI’s customer base: a clear boost in throughput, new bottlenecks shifting from code creation to code review, and the rise of “vibe coding,” where engineers trust AI-generated code they may not fully understand.He challenges long-held assumptions about readability and maintainability, arguing that software engineering is on the edge...
2025-09-1037 minHumans of ReliabilityFrontline Reliability: Protecting User Journeys with SLOs with Shery Brauner (Razor, ex-Zalando)What does it really take to move from firefighting incidents to building reliability at scale? In this episode of Humans of Reliability, Shery Brauner (Razor, ex-Zalando) shares her unique journey from frontend and backend engineering to leading site reliability practices. She explains why protecting the user journey is the key to effective incident management, how SLOs cut through noisy alerts, and why observability must come first.Shery also talks about practical steps teams can take to adopt an SLO-driven strategy, the pitfalls of over-instrumentation, and how AI is shaping the future of incident response. Whether you’re an...
2025-08-2031 minHumans of ReliabilityBalancing Reliability at the Crypto-Finance Frontier with Brian Shaw (Uphold)Sylvain Kalache sits down with Brian Shaw, Senior Engineering Leader at Uphold, to explore the reliability challenges that arise when operating at the intersection of traditional finance and crypto markets.Brian shares how unexpected market events can create massive traffic spikes, how their platform architecture and Kubernetes setup help them stay resilient, and why Uphold's transparency and regulatory approach make them both trustworthy and a high-profile target.The conversation also touches on AI's emerging role in operations, lessons from major incidents, and the delicate balance between innovation and stringent compliance in financial engineering.
2025-07-0313 minHumans of ReliabilityCommand Under Pressure: David Owczarek on Incident Leadership and Human-Centered ReliabilityIncident response is as much about people as it is about systems. In this episode, David Owczarek, a veteran engineer leader and seasoned incident commander, joins Silvan Kalache to unpack the human dynamics behind effective reliability leadership.Drawing on experiences across startups and global enterprises, David shares what really matters when everything breaks, including:– How incident response strategies shift between small companies and large enterprises– Why not every engineer should be an incident commander– How empathy and transparency during outages can deepen customer trust instead of eroding it– Where AI is sh...
2025-06-1723 minHumans of ReliabilityAI at the Frontlines of Healthcare Reliability with Ryan Lockard (CVS Health)AI is transforming reliability work—from reactive firefighting to proactive engineering. In this episode, Ryan Lockard, VP of Platform Engineering and AI Enablement at CVS Health, joins Sylvain Kalache to break down how AI is showing up on the frontlines of healthcare infrastructure and operations.From LLM copilots to cultural shifts in ownership, Ryan walks us through:How AI tools help troubleshoot legacy systems and assist during real-time incidentsWhy proactive reliability is finally within reach thanks to AI-enhanced tooling and workflowsWhat MCP servers are, and how natural language interfaces are streamlining cloud operationsHow engineering culture and on...
2025-05-3024 min
Adventures in DevOpsIncident Vibing: The Self-Healing System - DevOps 242Sylvain Kalache, Head of Developer Relations at Rootly joins us to explore the new frontier of incident response powered by large language models. We dive into the evolution of DevRel and how we meet the new challenges impacting our systems.We explore Sylvain's origin story in self-healing systems, dating back to his SlideShare and LinkedIn days. From ingesting logs via Fluentd to building early ML-driven RCA tools, he shares a vision of self-healing infrastructure that targets root causes rather than just restarting boxes. Plus, we trace the historical arc of deterministic and non-deterministic tools.The conversation...
2025-05-291h 10Humans of ReliabilityTrust Is the Product: Building Reliable Billing in the AI Era with Cosmo Wolfe (Metronome)In this episode, we sit down with Cosmo Wolfe, Head of Technology at Metronome, to unpack how reliability, trust, and architecture intersect in one of the most critical and overlooked parts of the AI product stack: billing.As AI workloads introduce unpredictable usage patterns and nontraditional pricing models—from token-based to outcome-based—companies are navigating a new frontier of customer trust. Cosmo explains why billing is more than just a backend function; it’s a key moment of truth in the product experience.We explore how event-sourced systems, rigorous monitoring, and internal accountability help avoid trust...
2025-05-2620 min
🧠 _Foresight Over Firefighting: Being Proactive in a Reactive World | Rootly's JJ Tang Podcast: Dev Interrupted (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)Episode: Foresight Over Firefighting: Being Proactive in a Reactive World | Rootly's JJ TangPub date: 2025-05-13Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationStill stuck in a reactive loop with incident response, only fixing problems after they happen? JJ Tang, Co-founder and CEO of Rootly, joins host Andrew Zigler to reveal how to shift beyond reactive, leveraging powerful AI and an often-underestimated skill in engineering: genuine customer empathy. Discover how these elements are crucial for navi...
2025-05-2544 minHumans of ReliabilityThe Golden Path to Nowhere: When Platforms Undermine Reliability with Chase Roberts (Northflank)Internal platforms promise speed, consistency, and scale — but what happens when they become a distraction? In this episode, Chase Roberts, COO at Northflank, joins Sylvain Kalache to examine the quiet ways platforms erode developer experience when not planned carefully. From abandoned golden paths to shadow deployments and brittle YAML pipelines, Chase walks us through: Why early PaaS got developer experience right and what it missed The cultural bias toward building over buying (and its hidden costs) How complexity quietly kills productivity and reliability, even when everything “works” The three questions every team should ask before building an IDP What...
2025-05-1427 min
Dev InterruptedForesight Over Firefighting: Being Proactive in a Reactive World | Rootly's JJ TangStill stuck in a reactive loop with incident response, only fixing problems after they happen? JJ Tang, Co-founder and CEO of Rootly, joins host Andrew Zigler to reveal how to shift beyond reactive, leveraging powerful AI and an often-underestimated skill in engineering: genuine customer empathy. Discover how these elements are crucial for navigating the complexities of modern infrastructure and shaping the future of incident management.JJ explores the forefront of incident response automation, discussing how to integrate shiny new tech like AI safely and why deep customer understanding is key to building trust and reliability. L...
2025-05-1344 minHumans of ReliabilityAI can boost developer productivity, if used right, with Justin Reock, Deputy CTO at DXIn this episode of Humans of Reliability, we sit down with Justin Reock, Deputy CTO at DX, to unpack the real impact of generative AI on developer productivity. Drawing from early data in DX’s GenAI Impact Report, he explains why time savings alone don’t tell the full story and why the real value might lie in shifting cognitive load toward meaningful work. We also explore how traditional productivity metrics like PR throughput can backfire, why teams need to move beyond DORA, and how modern frameworks like SPACE and the DX Core 4 offer a more complete view...
2025-04-3037 minHumans of ReliabilityWhy Reliability in the AI Era Starts with the Network with Marino WijayIn this episode, we explore how networking has shaped reliability as we know it. Marino Wijay cloud networking expert and Staff Solutions Architect at Kong shares how his journey began not as an SRE, but with cables, routers, and switches.Marino explains the evolution of the fabric holding systems together through virtualization, and how software-defined networking, which is now a key element to resilient applications.This episode also dives into the new challenges LLMs are introducing into networking. Marino discusses how these workloads introduce new types of reliability challenges: longer response times, context preservation, model...
2025-04-1727 minHumans of ReliabilityMetrics That Matter: Measuring Developer Productivity in the AI EraIn this episode of Humans of Reliability, Ryan McDonald is joined by Mark Quigley, Head of Platform Engineering at 90, for a conversation that cuts through the noise around developer productivity metrics and AI.Mark dives deep into how teams can measure what matters—without falling into the trap of turning every measure into a target. He shares how tools like Developer NPS, DORA metrics, and balanced scorecards can help teams optimize for both output and well-being—but only when framed with the right intent.As AI tools like GitHub Copilot begin to shift how engineering work...
2025-04-0939 minHumans of ReliabilityAre AI and Platforms Making SRE Obsolete? With Kaspar von Grünberg, Humanitec’s CEOLast year, over 89% of companies claimed to have adopted platform engineering. And, in the past month, LLMs have been disrupting how we think about software development. In this context, Kaspar, asks if the role of Site Reliability Engineers is being obsolete as we know it. Kaspar argues that while SREs aren’t going anywhere, their responsibilities are evolving—fast.We talk about:The need for the SRE role to be transformedHow to build reliability as part every golden pathThe role of AI and LLMs in Developer ExperienceThe limits of LLMs for reliability and infrastructure
2025-03-2425 min
Entrepreneurs on FireBeyond the Blueprint: Redefining Incident Management with JJ TangJJ Tang is the co-founder and CEO of Rootly, a company redefining how organizations approach incident management and reliability. Rootly is powering 100s of customers like Figma, NVIDIA, Canva, and more. Top 3 Value Bombs 1. Solve the problem from many angles. Go out, source and find your customers where they are and work ruthlessly. 2. All good leaders need to be operators. If the CEO can’t do it, you can’t expect anyone to do it. 3. Efficiency is the best force and function for prioritization. Visit their website and get a fr...
2025-03-1924 minHumans of ReliabilityScientific Incident Management with Dan SlimmonDan Slimmon is an incident management veteran who's worked at Etsy, HashiCorp, and now leads consulting and training on pragmatic, non-bureaucratic incident response. In this episode, Dan shares his philosophy on "scientific incident response," the importance of hypothesis-driven troubleshooting, and why incidents should be seen as normal in complex systems. We also explore:Why asking the right questions is more important than knowing all the answers. How to use nerd sniping to unlock insights from engineers. Common failure patterns he sees across organizations. EPISODE LINKS: Video and key takeaways D2E Incident Leaders...
2025-03-1437 minHumans of ReliabilityHow AI broke serverless and what to do about it with Vercel’s Mariano Fernández CocirioMariano, Staff Product Manager at Vercel, explains why serverless architectures are hitting unexpected limits—they’re too fast. The industry has spent millions optimizing serverless for speed, but AI workloads are changing the game. In the AI realm, slower execution often leads to better results. The challenge? Paying for all that idle compute time while waiting for AI responses. Mariano explains how Vercel Fluid is introducing a new execution model that blends the best of serverless and traditional servers—scaling efficiently while reducing costs. Mariano breaks down Fluid’s architecture, its built-in reliability features, and how it red...
2025-03-0613 minHumans of ReliabilityI Want My Shoes Fast! Observability, SRE Burnout, and OTel with Dynatrace’s Adriana VillelaIn this episode, we sit down with Adriana Villela, Principal DevRel at Dynatrace and OpenTelemetry contributor to break down how observability impacts reliability. We dive into what contributes to SRE burnout and how managers can create psychologically safer spaces for responders. Adriana also shares her perspective on AI as an observability-buddy to navigate incidents. SHOW LINKS:Video and takeawaysAdriana’s podcast: Geeking Out with AdrianaPodcast with Hazel Weakly mentioned by Adriana
2025-02-2734 min
Code RED#19 - Faster Incident Resolution: How Rootly is Redefining Reliability with JJ TangRootly's Co-founder and CEO, JJ Tang, joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to discuss how Rootly streamlines enterprise incident management. They explore how JJ’s experience at Instacart shaped Rootly, his vision for AI’s capabilities in the monitoring and incident response world, and how he’s building a tool designed to save teams time.
2025-02-2036 minHumans of ReliabilityAI in Production with GitHub’s Sean GoedeckeIn this episode, we sit down with Sean Goedecke, Staff Software Engineer at GitHub, to discuss where LLMs fit into real-world development. Sean shares how he’s using LLMs how he’s drawing the line for AI-assistance in the codebases he manages—though, as he says, this might all change by next summer. Sean also weighs in on how LLMs could assist SREs during outages—especially when you’re only half-awake at 3 a.m. after a rather inconvinient page. Tune in for a nuanced take on the future of AI in software engineering, “vibe coding,” a...
2025-02-1817 minHumans of ReliabilityThe Reliability Diagnosis: Google’s Steve McGhee on Debugging and Incident ResponseIn this episode of Humans of Reliability, we sit down with Steve McGhee, Reliability Advocate at Google, to discuss his journey from early SRE work to advocating for reliability best practices. Steve shares fascinating stories from his time at Google, the challenges of implementing SRE in enterprises, and what people often misunderstand about the discipline. He also offers valuable insights on incident response, distributed systems, and the underrated skill every reliability engineer should master. Whether you're new to SRE or a seasoned professional, this conversation is packed with wisdom and practical takeaways.This ep...
2025-02-1015 min
Build vs. BuyJJ Tang, Co-Founder and CEO, Rootly (ex-Instacart, Strava)Mang-Git interviews JJ Tang, co-founder and CEO of Rootly. They discuss Rootly's journey as an incident response management system, frameworks around building vs. buying software, and the challenges of differentiating internal tools from market solutions. JJ shares insights from his career, including his time at IBM and Instacart, and delves into Rootly’s unique approach to managing and learning from incidents. They also touch upon personal experiences, like cycling goals and technological inspirations, and highlight the significance of building strong business fundamentals.00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome01:29 JJ's Background and Journey03:19 The Birth of Ro...
2025-02-0737 minHumans of ReliabilityNo CS Degree, No Problem: Building a Career in Tech LeadershipWhat does it take to lead service delivery at a company experiencing massive growth? Hannah Hammonds, Service Delivery Lead at Prolific, shares her journey from an IT networking apprentice to a tech leader shaping reliability and incident response. We discuss the evolving role of service delivery, the power of mentorship, and how confidence transforms careers.Plus, we debate hot dogs, spoilers, and The Office.Tune in for career insights, leadership lessons, and a few laughs! 🎙️🚀This podcast episode is also available on YouTube if you want to see a video vers...
2025-02-0511 minHumans of ReliabilityBeyond SLOs: How an ex-Google SRE scaled reliability at the largest e-commerce in the nordicsWhat happens when a Google-trained SRE joins a fast-moving e-commerce company? Gastón Rial Saibene, SRE Lead at Boozt.com, joins Humans of Reliability to talk about adapting reliability practices for different company sizes, the limits of SLOs, and the importance of automation. We also dive into decision-making, his favorite books, and—just for fun—whether he’d survive a zombie apocalypse. Tune in for insights, laughs, and a fresh perspective on the world of reliability engineering!
2025-02-0307 minHumans of ReliabilityThe Domino Effect of Outages with Nuno Tomás, Founder of isDown.app🎙️ Humans of Reliability: Keeping systems up and the lights on isn’t just about technology—it’s about the people behind it. In this episode, we’re thrilled to chat with Nuno Tomás, founder of IsDown.app, a vendor outage monitoring tool transforming how teams handle third-party incidents.Nuno shares his journey from software engineer to entrepreneur, the pivotal 4 a.m. moment that inspired Isdown, and the challenges of balancing startup life with family. We dive into the complexities of incident communication, how to tackle alert fatigue, and why transparency is key to building trust in SaaS...
2025-01-2434 min
The MonkCastJJ Tang on Incident Management, Cold Emailing CEOs, and the Origins of RootlyIn this RedMonk conversation, JJ Tang, CEO of Rootly, chats with senior analyst Kelly Fitzpatrick about the evolving landscape of incident management, the significance of consistency over speed, and the impact of AI on business operations. Tang shares his career journey, from landing a job at IBM (involving cold emailing the CEO) to building incident management tools at Instacart, to starting Rootly with cofounder Quentin Rousseau. He focuses on the importance of technical skills, networking, and understanding customer needs. Tang also reflects on the challenges of running a startup during economic shifts and offers valuable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.
2025-01-1533 min
This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and softwareEpisode 6 - Can You Buy Resilience? With Special Guest Steve McGheeSteve is the host of the Google SRE Prodcast, you should check it out!Colette got her chickens from Greenfire Farms, and her chicken coop from Carolina Coops, if anyone is wondering.The Chris Hayes podcast Colette mentioned about unconditional cash transfers is here.Iain M. Banks is an author of The Culture series, a set of fiction books based in a post-scarcity societyIf you didn’t get the Vizzini/Inigo Montoya references, you should probably find a way to see The Pr...
2025-01-0855 min
Detection at ScaleRootly’s JJ Tang on Transforming Incident Management CultureIn this episode of Detection at Scale, Jack speaks to JJ Tang, CEO and Co-founder of Rootly, about revolutionizing incident management in tech organizations. JJ shares his journey from practitioner to founder and emphasizes the importance of viewing incident management as a cultural and collaborative effort rather than just a tooling issue.
JJ touches on breaking down silos between security and other teams to enhance communication and reliability, and empowering security practitioners to take on educator roles within their organizations. He also offers actionable insights on creating a culture of reliability and improving incident response st...
2024-11-1425 min
Internet Plumber21: Florida gators, open source design tools, board game kickstarters, and Haley Ingram from C&CIn this episode of the Internet Plumber Podcast, we chat with our friend Haley Ingram — the founder and CEO of Coffee and Contracts. We chat everything from camper van conversions, gators, to SaaS marketing tools, this episode really has it all. We also dig into Hopsotch.io, and a few open source design tools that might start to give Figma a run for their money. Oh and Gavin backed a product in this pod — tune in to find out what he backed on kickstarter.
Drop your comments & thoughts below, and join us weekly as we zip through our newsletter to s...
2024-06-0451 min
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E25: The Incident Response Revolution: Overthrowing War-Room Chaos and Automating Slack-Native SRE Workflows with JJ Tang, Co-Founder & CEO of RootlyJJ Tang grew up in mainland China, though eventually he came to the US for University and stayed. He found a job, started working and eventually, moved to Canada, as the entrepreneur ecosystem was quite friendly. He has worked for companies like Instacart, IBM and Cisco, gaining vast experience in a myriad of roles. But outside of tech, he is engaged to be married in 2025, and is big into road cycling. In addition, he has a dog named Nova, which his current venture centers their merch design around.At Instacart, JJ started to build a tool for...
2024-05-2130 min
10KMedia PodcastEpisode 46: Ashley Sawatsky, Incident Response & Reliability Advocate at RootlyAdam sits down with Ashley to discuss the benefits of declaring more incidents, providing engineers with the right incentives, and why cobbling together slack and google docs just won't cut it.
2024-04-0346 min
Geeking Out with Adriana VillelaThe One Where We Geek Out on Reliability with Ashley Sawatsky of RootlyAbout our guest:As a founding member of Shopify's incident response program for nearly 7 years, Ashley Sawatsky led incident communications and processes. Currently, as Senior Incident Response Advocate at Rootly, she consults with tech giants like Canva, Cisco, NVIDIA, and more on incident response strategies.Find our guest on:X (Twitter)LinkedInFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow Links:ShopifyRootlyWinows 98Ruby on RailsSite Reliability Engineering (Book)Disney InteractiveWorking Effectively With Executives During an...
2024-02-2043 min
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering DailyCross-functional Incident Management with Ashley Sawatsky and Niall MurphyIncident management is the process of managing and resolving unexpected disruptions or issues in software systems, especially those that are customer-facing or critical to business operations. Implementing a robust incident management system is often a key challenge in technical environments. Rootly is a platform to handle incident management directly from Slack, and is used by hundreds of leading companies including Canva, Grammarly, and Cisco.
Ashley Sawatsky leads Developer Relations at Rootly and previously led Shopify’s Incident Communications team. Niall Murphy is Co-founder and CEO at Stanza. He has written extensively about reliability engineering and is the co...
2023-08-1750 min
Software Engineering DailyCross-functional Incident Management with Ashley Sawatsky and Niall MurphyIncident management is the process of managing and resolving unexpected disruptions or issues in software systems, especially those that are customer-facing or critical to business operations. Implementing a robust incident management system is often a key challenge in technical environments. Rootly is a platform to handle incident management directly from Slack, and is used by hundreds of leading companies including Canva, Grammarly, and Cisco.Ashley Sawatsky leads Developer Relations at Rootly and previously led Shopify's Incident Communications team. Niall Murphy is Co-founder and CEO at Stanza. He has written extensively about reliability engineering and is the co-author...
2023-08-1750 min
Softwarible Bites#15 What is an SRE? by JJ Tang of rootly.comThe responsibilities of an SRE role are loosely identified. But in general, focus on reliability (it’s in the name) and incident response. The article featured in this episode walks us through the responsibilities of an SRE engineer.
If you are looking for software and cloud development services and training, check out softwarible.com. We help customers in their software and cloud journey. Whether it’s taking software from ideas to complete solutions, migrating existing systems to the cloud, or mentoring and training individuals and teams, we make it work for your needs.
Article: https://root...
2021-12-1012 minSoftwarible Bites#8 Google’s State of DevOps 2021 Report: What SREs Need to Know by Quentin Rousseau of rootly (rootly.com)The Accelerate State of DevOps 2021 Report by Google was released. This article discusses four key takeaways for SREs.
If you are looking for software and cloud development services and training, check out softwarible.com. We help customers in their software and cloud journey. Whether it’s taking software from ideas to complete solutions, migrating existing systems to the cloud, or mentoring and training individuals and teams, we make it work for your needs.
Article: https://rootly.com/blog/google-s-state-of-devops-2021-report-what-sres-need-to-know
Tool of the Day: https://github.com/itaysk/kubectl-neat
2021-11-2413 min