April 15th, 2019. It’s been a while since I’ve written anything personal like this. The world was going through some intense shifts, and it felt fitting to reflect on what we were dealing with as engineers in the midst of all that chaos.

First off, let me start by saying that the era we’re living in now—where remote-first infrastructure is scaling rapidly—is a direct result of the events that are unfolding right here. The sudden shift towards working from home wasn’t just about avoiding pandemics; it was also about embracing new ways of doing things, especially for those of us who’ve always advocated for distributed teams.

One of the biggest challenges we faced in my team was ensuring that our internal developer portals were robust enough to handle the increased traffic and demand. We were using Backstage—a fantastic tool that was gaining traction within our industry. It allowed us to provide a central hub for all things related to our tech stack, from documentation to deployment pipelines. However, as more developers began working remotely, the load on these systems started to increase significantly.

We spent countless nights troubleshooting and optimizing. The Kubernetes complexity fatigue was real, but so were the opportunities to learn and improve. We had debates over whether we should stick with the current setup or migrate to a new platform entirely. In the end, pragmatism won out; we decided to focus on making our existing tools more reliable.

Around this time, SRE roles were becoming more formalized within companies. It made sense; as systems grew in complexity and distributed teams became the norm, there was an undeniable need for dedicated engineers focused on reliability engineering. I found myself increasingly working with these folks, bouncing ideas off them to ensure we had a robust monitoring and alerting system in place.

Another thing that stood out during this period was the rise of eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter). It seemed like every other conference talk mentioned how this new technology could revolutionize network programming. I found myself researching it in my spare time, fascinated by its potential to provide deeper insights into our systems without adding too much overhead.

On a personal note, one of the biggest challenges we faced was ensuring that our remote-first culture worked well for everyone. We had weekly stand-ups and pair-programming sessions, but there were always concerns about communication barriers and whether we were truly fostering an inclusive environment. It’s easy to lose those human connections when you can’t see each other face-to-face.

Then, of course, there was the barrage of tech news that kept us all on our toes. The story of Julian Assange’s arrest certainly made headlines, but it wasn’t as impactful for me personally as some of the more technical stories like Google blocking a web browser creator or the unveiling of the first-ever image of a black hole. These events reminded us that while we were deeply embedded in the tech world, there was so much happening beyond our screens.

Reflecting on this time, it’s clear that the changes we’re seeing now—like remote infrastructure scaling and SRE roles proliferating—are here to stay. They represent a shift towards more resilient and distributed systems, something that is going to be crucial as we move forward.

So here’s to another year of challenges and growth. May our efforts continue to make life easier for everyone, whether they’re working from home or in an office. And who knows? Maybe next year’s reflection will be even more exciting!

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Feel free to tweak this post if needed; it’s a genuine reflection on the times.