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Slight Reliability

Stephen Townshend

115 episodes

4 days ago

Send us a text From the day we invented computers we've been struggling to keep applications running and delivering services to the business. Is this latest wave of AI helping or hurting us? This week I'm joined by Causely founder Shmuel Kliger to dive into... 🌊 The three waves of AI hype over the decades (the history of AI) ☠️ The dangers of over-promising and under-delivering what AI can do 🧠 What is causal reasoning? 😱 Is AI replacing SREs? 🔮 AI as a way to allow humans to solve higher lev...

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All content for Slight Reliability is the property of Stephen Townshend and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

Send us a text From the day we invented computers we've been struggling to keep applications running and delivering services to the business. Is this latest wave of AI helping or hurting us? This week I'm joined by Causely founder Shmuel Kliger to dive into... 🌊 The three waves of AI hype over the decades (the history of AI) ☠️ The dangers of over-promising and under-delivering what AI can do 🧠 What is causal reasoning? 😱 Is AI replacing SREs? 🔮 AI as a way to allow humans to solve higher lev...

Show more...

Episodes (20/115)

Slight Reliability

AI Use-cases for SRE with Shmuel Kliger (Episode 113)

Send us a text From the day we invented computers we've been struggling to keep applications running and delivering services to the business. Is this latest wave of AI helping or hurting us? This week I'm joined by Causely founder Shmuel Kliger to dive into... 🌊 The three waves of AI hype over the decades (the history of AI) ☠️ The dangers of over-promising and under-delivering what AI can do 🧠 What is causal reasoning? 😱 Is AI replacing SREs? 🔮 AI as a way to allow humans to solve higher lev...

3 weeks ago

31 minutes

Slight Reliability

Operational Intelligence with Adam Kinniburgh (Episode 112)

Send us a text What is operational intelligence and how is it different from observability or BI? This week I'm joined by SquaredUp's VP of Innovation Adam Kinniburgh to answer that question and many more including... ❓ What is operational intelligence? 🙈 Relating observability back to customer, business, or revenue 😎 The value of giving stakeholders confidence 🌉 Who bridges the gap between tech and business or engineers and leadership? 🦋 Correlation VS causation and our innate desire to buil...

4 weeks ago

31 minutes

Slight Reliability

Leading Platform Teams with Dinesh Sukhija (Episode 111)

Send us a text How does leading platform teams differ from leading product teams? This week I'm joined by experienced technology leader Dinesh Sukhija to answer that question and many more including... ❓ What is a platform team? ⚽ Coaching engineers to focus on outcomes ☀️ Connecting platform initiatives to business goals ✋ Identifying the limiters in your team 🎤 Spreading knowledge and avoiding single points of failure ...and much more. You can find Dinesh on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin....

1 month ago

32 minutes

Slight Reliability

Leadership Round One! (Episode 110)

Send us a text How has my first two years as a manager in tech been? What have I learned? What do I need to work on? This week I share my experiences over the past couple of years. I cover: 🔥 My recent close call with burnout 🫶 How I attempted to build a team culture 💪 The importance of tough conversations 🥱 How roles and responsibilities might be boring to think about but is critical ❓ What's next? ...and much more. You can find me on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ ...

1 month ago

19 minutes

Slight Reliability

The Implications of AI on Observability with Aaron "Checo" Pacheco (Episode 109)

Send us a text How could AI help human beings negotiate the mountains of telemetry we collect to get simple and fast insight? This week I'm joined by Ottermon AI CEO and founder Checo Pacheco about the lifecycle of observability coverage and tooling within organisations and how AI is helping to find signals amongst the noise and reduce cognitive load for SREs. We discuss... 🎂 The need for a layer of logic on top of our telemetry data 🚲 The observability lifecycle of a DevOps team 🎶 How most o...

2 months ago

38 minutes

Slight Reliability

Chaos Engineering with Kolton Andrus (Episode 108)

Send us a text What is chaos engineering and how is it being used in 2025? This week I'm joined by Gremlin CEO and founder Kolton Andrus to discuss... 🌪️ What is chaos engineering and what is its origins? 🪴 How has it evolved over the year? 🤖 The role of AI agents in SRE work 💰 Justifying the value of chaos engineering 🏃‍♀️‍➡️ How do I get started? ...and much more. You can find Kolton on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kolton-andrus-77315a2/ And you can find out more about Gremlin's n...

2 months ago

31 minutes

Slight Reliability

Team Topologies with Luke McManus (Episode 107)

Send us a text What are Team Topologies? How can they be used to deliver value simpler and more effectively (and in a more humane way)? This week I'm joined by Luke McManus to discuss... ⛰️ What are the four team topologies? 🏆 Can we have too much collaboration? ⌚ Team interaction models 🌏 Cognitive load 🏃‍♀️‍➡️ Value dynamics mapping ...and much more. You can find Luke on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-mcmanus-agile/ Check out the recently released second edition of the Team Top...

3 months ago

23 minutes

Slight Reliability

Contributing to Open Source with Wendy Ha (Episode 106)

Send us a text How do you begin contributing to an open source project? What's it like? What do you get out of it? This week I'm joined by Wendy Ha who shares her unique story of joining the Kubernetes project and becoming a contributor. We explore... ⛰️ What it's like working on one of the biggest open source projects in the world 🏆 The benefits of contributing to open source ⌚ How much time and effort does it take? 🌏 The unique challenges of contributing from APAC (and the need for more con...

3 months ago

43 minutes

Slight Reliability

Influencing Leadership with Nora Jones (Episode 105)

Send us a text As an #SRE how do you influence senior leadership to get support and priority for the things you care about? To answer this question I'm joined by Nora Jones, founder of Jeli and now Head of Pricing, Product Strategy and Growth at PagerDuty. Our conversation touches on... 🤝 How understanding needs to flow both ways (between engineers and leaders) 🎨 Reliability is as much an art as a science 📝 Using napkin math to start conversations 🧠 Understand the system (your org) before try...

3 months ago

28 minutes

Slight Reliability

Slight Reliability Podcast Retrospective (Episode 104)

Send us a text This week I do a retrospective on the Slight Reliability podcast. 👂 How many people listen to it? ❤️ How do I feel about the show? 🎉 What's going well? 🪴 What could be better? ❔ What's next for the show? If you want to check out the podcast that came before Slight Reliability, you can find Performance Time archived on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@performance-time You can find Stephen on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app...

4 months ago

27 minutes

Slight Reliability

Burnout with Colette Alexander (Episode 103)

Send us a text Have you burned out at work? What was your experience? How did you work through it? This week I'm joined by the incredible Colette Alexander to discuss what burnout is, what it means, and we both share our personal experiences burning out at work. We cover... 🔥 What is burnout? ❓ Why does it happen? 🫀 What are the symptoms? 🥊 Fight, flight, or freeze 🧑‍🚒 Advice on how to recover ...and much more. Resources from the show... Why you're so angry at work (and what to do about it) b...

4 months ago

38 minutes

Slight Reliability

Mobile Observability with Hanson Ho (Episode 102)

Send us a text This week I'm joined by the wonderful Hanson Ho to discuss the unique challenges and opportunities in making our mobile apps observable! We cover... 📱 The mobile/backend observability divide ✍️ The challenge of distributed tracing on mobile apps 🌏 The entire device runtime environment matters for your app 👤 The quest for user-centric mobile observability ✅ Advice on how to get started with mobile observability ...and much more. You can find Hanson on: LinkedIn: https://www.link...

5 months ago

31 minutes

Slight Reliability

Intro to Resilience Engineering with Michelle Casey (Episode 101)

Send us a text This week on the I'm joined once more by SRE leader Michelle Casey who gives a broad and shallow introduction to resilience engineering. We cover... 🏋️‍♀️ Reliability VS Robustness VS Resilience 🧩 What is a complex system? 🔢 Safety one/safety two 🧠 Mental models 😩 Human error ...and so much more. Resources from this episode: Four concepts for resilience (paper) by Dr. David Woods https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276139783_Four_concepts_for_resilience_and_the_implication...

5 months ago

39 minutes

Slight Reliability

Learning with John Allspaw (Episode 100)

Send us a text This week on the 100th episode I'm joined by DevOps and Resilience Engineering legend John Allspaw to talk about learning (especially from incidents). We discuss... 📒 Classroom VS situated learning 🤝 The myth of the perfect handover ITIL as a coping strategy to try and make sense of the organic, wild, and messy 🥕 How you cannot incentivise to avoid incidents (it doesn't work that way) ❤️‍🩹 You can't understand how something is broken unless you know how it's supposed to work i...

6 months ago

48 minutes

Slight Reliability

Focusing on What Matters with Trent Hornibrook (Episode 99)

Send us a text This week I'm joined by SRE leader Trent Hornibrook who shares a story about how he improved on-call early in his career, and then we explore the broader theme of focusing on the things that matter in observability, incident response, on-call, and beyond. We discuss... 🔌 Empowering engineers to implement change in your org 🧑‍🍼 Focusing on what matters (customer & business > technology) 👀 Not just adding more monitoring as the output of each PIR 😎 How autonomy can lead to...

7 months ago

29 minutes

Slight Reliability

The Root Cause Fallacy with Andrew Hatch (Episode 98)

Send us a text This week I'm joined by SRE leader Andrew Hatch from Cisco ThousandEyes to talk about a dirty word in the resilience community... root cause. In this excellent conversation we explore... 🌌 Is the root cause of every incident the big bang? 🦖 How the value of root cause degrades as complexity increases 🫣 That if the culture is not blameless, people will hide things 🌳 Alternative approaches to root cause analysis such as branching timelines 🙋 Getting someone without skin in the ga...

7 months ago

32 minutes

Slight Reliability

Synthetic Monitoring with David Dick (Episode 97)

Send us a text This week I'm joined by David Dick from 2 Steps to (finally!) discuss synthetic monitoring. We cover... 🤖 What is synthetic monitoring? 🦾 What are the benefits and drawbacks to using it? ☢️ Non-web based synthetics (the tough stuff) 🍹 Combining RUM and synthetics 🫢 Does synthetics need an OTEL-like framework? ...and much more. You can find David on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-dick/ You can find more about 2 Steps at https://2steps.io/# You can find Stephen on: ...

8 months ago

33 minutes

Slight Reliability

Tech Leadership with Milan Brown (Episode 96)

Send us a text This week I'm joined by Cin7 Engineering Director Milan Brown to unpack the challenges of technology management and leadership. We discuss... ✖️ Theory X vs Theory Y management 🗣️ Intention based leadership and communication 🏢 Conditions in an org for people to thrive 😵‍💫 How do you learn to manage and lead? 🫤 Managing people when you're not an expert in what they do ...and much more. Resources mentioned during the episode: Turn The Ship Around! (book): https://davidmarquet.com...

8 months ago

31 minutes

Slight Reliability

Finding Tech Work with Leon Adato (Episode 95)

Send us a text This week Leon Adato and I break down the state of applying for roles in tech. We cover... 📝 What a resume or CV is and is not 🤝 Leveraging your connections rather than relying on applying cold 🪄 How most job descriptions are works of fiction 🦾 White-fonting to game AI resume assessment 🧪 Experimental ways we could recruit ...and our pitch for Kubernetes the Rock Opera (and much more) You can find Leon's job postings weekly on his website: https://www.adatosystems.com/category/...

9 months ago

36 minutes

Slight Reliability

Getting a Start in SRE with Priyam Kumar (Episode 94)

Send us a text This week Priyam Kumar shares his story of moving from a massive organisation to a startup and the challenges and growth that came from that. We discuss... 🪖 War stories and examples of production incidents 🩹 The "hacks" we build to keep things running (and how maybe that's just normal) 😎 Keeping it simple... YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It!) 🧯 The perils of getting stuck in reactive mode 📖 Areas of of learning if you want to get into SRE ...and much much more. You can find Priy...

9 months ago

31 minutes