The Curious Engineer

All blogs / DevOps / SRE / infrastructure

Dan Slimmon

blog.danslimmon.com

Scientific incident response

DevOps / SRE / infrastructureEngineering management / careers

’15’20’25
Posts
86 from 20 Jul 2012 to 25 Jun 2025
Posting
now and then
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://blog.danslimmon.com/feed/

2025 4

  1. Lecture: Queueing theory on a cocktail napkin
  2. did u ever read so hard u accidentally wrote?
  3. Is ops a bullshit job?
  4. Incident SEV scales are a waste of time

2024 18

  1. The queueing shell game
  2. Podcast: Small Batches with Adam Hawkins
  3. Putting a meaningful dent in your error backlog
  4. No Observability Without Theory: The Talk
  5. Leading incidents when you’re junior
  6. Fight understanding decay with a rich Incident Summary
  7. Ask questions first, shoot later
  8. Podcast appearance: The Debrief from Incident.io
  9. The World Record for Loneliness
  10. Garden-path incidents
  11. Explaining the fire
  12. I was on the Slight Reliability podcast!
  13. Incident, Inçident, Incidënt
  14. Dead air on the incident call
  15. Clinical troubleshooting: diagnose any production issue, fast.
  16. Interviewing engineers for diagnostic skills
  17. 3 questions that will make you a phenomenal rubber duck
  18. Why transaction order matters, even if you’re only reading

2023 11

  1. Concurrent locks and MultiXacts in Postgres
  2. Squeeze the hell out of the system you have
  3. Don’t fix it just because it’s technical debt.
  4. It’s fine to use names in post-mortems
  5. Incident metrics tell you nothing about reliability
  6. Post-mortems: content over structure
  7. Outliers carry information. Don’t leave them on the table
  8. 5 production surprises worth investigating
  9. Platform teams don’t need to act like companies
  10. Fix tomorrow’s problems by fixing today’s problems
  11. Huh! as a signal

2022 10

  1. Upstream-local queueing
  2. Don’t build Cities of Nowhere
  3. Descriptive engineering: not just for post-mortems
  4. I used a spreadsheet to save myself 12 hours a year grocery shopping
  5. A simple intervention against Ugh Fields
  6. The time horizon outlook: an alternative to technical debt
  7. Using Little’s Law to scale applications
  8. Technical debt is not a thing
  9. Learning about attention deficit through spreadsheets
  10. Big Problems and Small Problems under load

2021 3

  1. Managing entropy in complex systems: the Maxwell’s Demon approach
  2. Takeaways: managing attention with stacks
  3. Managing attention with stacks

2019 8

  1. Stop apologizing for bugs
  2. Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation
  3. An Incident Command Training Handbook
  4. Believing in the value of conceptual labor
  5. No observability without theory
  6. The paradox of the bloated backlog
  7. Latency- and Throughput-Optimized Clusters Under Load
  8. The Latency/Throughput Tradeoff: Why Fast Services Are Slow And Vice Versa

2017 4

  1. What makes a good alert?
  2. Ticket Cutoff Ages Are Silly
  3. Cap Your Ticket Backlog
  4. Let’s Stop Pretending Estimates Are Exact

2016 5

  1. Falsifiability: why you rule things out, not in
  2. A Moral Thought Experiment That Breaks My Brain
  3. The most important thing to understand about queues
  4. 3 Things That Make Encryption Easier
  5. Start a Paper Club!

2015 6

  1. The 10 Best Books I Read In 2015
  2. Troubleshooting On A Distributed Team Without Losing Common Ground
  3. Minding Your Pees And Queues
  4. When efficiency hurts more than it helps
  5. What makes an expert an expert?
  6. Kanban Highway: The Least Popular Mario Kart Course

2014 5

  1. MTTR: lower isn’t always better
  2. Why I only page on downtime. ONLY.
  3. Blameless Postmortems & Bayes’ Theorem
  4. Nudging Engineers Past Mathphobia
  5. Wherein I Rant About Fourier Analysis

2013 8

  1. Devops needs feminism
  2. Making a quick data visualization web-app with Shiny
  3. Quirks are bugs
  4. A data set analyzed by an idiot, full of noise and worry, signifying nothing
  5. Howto: Setting up a proxy server that requires users to log in via Google Apps
  6. Pulling data from OpenTSDB into R
  7. Parameterizing metrics by time through Graphite abuse
  8. Putting a number on scalability

2012 4

  1. Calculating the expectation value of knowing Jeopardy! answers
  2. Car alarms and smoke alarms: the tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity
  3. The Universe is not listening
  4. You Know Who’s Smart? Friggin’ Doctors, Man.