August 24th, 2020. It’s been three months since everything started changing in the tech world and my personal life, but it feels like a lifetime ago when I was still commuting to an office. Now, I’m working from a spare bedroom that doubles as a home gym—yes, all on Zoom calls most days. Let’s dive into how this day unfolded.

The Morning Stand-Up

The morning kicked off with our daily stand-up in Backstage, our internal developer portal. We’re using Backstage to centralize information and tools for developers, but sometimes it feels like a Rube Goldberg machine gone wild. Today, we spent some time discussing the latest release of our platform monitoring dashboard, which has been giving us fits since launch. I spent most of the call explaining how eBPF snippets helped me trace down some latency issues in one of our microservices.

Code Review and Debugging

After the meeting, it was straight into code review. One of my engineers had implemented a feature using ArgoCD for GitOps, but there were some edge cases we needed to work through. I sat with her, going line-by-line over her changes while trying to recall all the intricacies of Kubernetes and Flux’s interactions. It’s amazing how much you forget when you haven’t been working on something intensely.

I mentioned a time a few months ago when a coworker and I spent days debugging an issue only to realize that our configuration in Kubernetes had a typo. That little lesson still haunts me, and now every time I hit the “Apply” button, I pause for a moment of silence. But it’s those moments that make you grow.

Lunch and Learn

Around noon, we took a break to have a “Lunch and Learn.” Our team is really into these sessions where someone shares something interesting or relevant to our work. Today’s topic was on the rise of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) roles within companies. I’ve been thinking about the growing pains that come with scaling engineering teams, especially in remote-first environments like ours.

One thing struck me as particularly true: traditional ops and development roles are converging. The lines between who is responsible for what are becoming less distinct. As someone who has transitioned through these roles over the years, I can appreciate how much our responsibilities now overlap. But it also means more work—and less siloing.

Afternoon Hack

In the afternoon, my team worked on a hackathon-style project to improve our logging and monitoring stack. We’ve been talking about integrating eBPF more deeply into our system for some time now, but we always put it off. This was our chance to make progress. After lunch, I dove deep into setting up BCC (BPF tracer) probes on a few of our critical services.

It’s frustrating how many moving parts are involved in modern platform engineering. Each tool has its own quirks and limitations. But as we debugged and configured things, the satisfaction of seeing real data flow through these probes was undeniable. There’s nothing quite like watching logs come alive with the help of eBPF.

Reflections on Remote Work

As the day wound down, I reflected on how different this feels from working in an office. Sure, there are perks to not having a commute and being able to work in pajamas if you want. But there’s also something missing when you can’t just walk over to someone’s desk for a quick chat or grab a cup of coffee with your team.

One positive has been the ability to focus more on my personal well-being. I’ve started taking better care of myself, going for runs in the park near my house and trying out new recipes. But there’s still that part of me that misses the camaraderie of office life, even if it is just hanging out in the break room or grabbing lunch with colleagues.

The Day in Review

August 24th, 2020, was a day filled with debugging, learning, and reflection. From troubleshooting Kubernetes issues to diving into eBPF for logging, it’s clear that platform engineering continues to evolve at a rapid pace. As we move forward, I’m looking forward to seeing how these technologies will shape the way we build and maintain our systems.

And maybe, just maybe, when this pandemic is over, we’ll all be back in an office together—though hopefully with better remote tools so that we can still collaborate seamlessly while having those face-to-face interactions. Until then, I’ll keep pushing forward, one line of code at a time.

Stay curious and keep debugging!