SRE. Based in Kathmandu. Still gets nervous before on-call shifts even after three years.
I keep cloud systems from falling over. Sometimes things still fall over anyway. That is the job. I have made peace with it, mostly.
if you are reading this you have made it further than my last few job applications didI did not plan to end up in infrastructure. I started in tech support at Worldlink, telling retail customers to restart their routers. Then CloudChomp, where I learned what a hypervisor and deployment was. Then BerryBytes, where someone finally handed me a Kubernetes cluster and said good luck.
Three years later I am doing SRE work for a company in London, from my home in Kathmandu, and I still feel a small spike of dread every time my phone buzzes during an on call week. I do not think that feeling goes away. I think you just get faster at responding while still feeling it.
What I am actually good at: noticing when something is about to break before it breaks, writing Terraform so I do not have to remember which button I clicked last time, and writing runbooks detailed enough that 3am me can follow them without thinking.
What I am not: someone who has never paged the wrong person, never let an alert sit unread too long, never stared at a dashboard at 1 AM wondering if I broke this or if it broke itself.
— Kiran