Title: A Month in Review: From Retro Gaming Projects to SRE Realities

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March 2019 was a month of contrasts and contradictions. On one hand, I found myself working on the usual day-to-day ops and platform engineering tasks—debugging Kubernetes clusters, arguing about infrastructure as code practices, and optimizing our internal tools for development efficiency. On the other hand, my personal life was being disrupted by something none of us could have predicted: the beginning of a global pandemic.

The Ops Reality Check

During one particularly frustrating Friday afternoon, I found myself knee-deep in a Kubernetes cluster issue that had been plaguing our platform team for weeks. It turned out to be a combination of an incorrect configuration and a misbehaving eBPF program—a perfect storm of complexity that we hadn’t anticipated.

The problem was this: A new application dependency required a specific version of an eBPF program, which somehow managed to conflict with the existing version running in production. This kind of issue is both rare and deeply annoying because it’s hard to predict such collisions. Debugging it involved tracing through logs, looking at system calls, and trying to understand how the kernel was handling our custom code.

We ended up spending a full day just trying to get the environment stable enough to diagnose the problem. By the time we got it fixed, I couldn’t help but think that perhaps eBPF’s time in the spotlight might come with its own set of challenges—especially as more teams start experimenting with it.

Platform Engineering Progress

At the same time, there was a lot of excitement around platform engineering and internal developer portals like Backstage. We were just getting started with our own version, trying to build something that would streamline the creation and management of our microservices-based applications. The idea was to provide developers with an easy-to-use dashboard for managing their dependencies, services, and configurations.

One of the more humorous moments was when we had a meeting where everyone was enthusiastically discussing how Backstage could help us manage our infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates. It felt like we were in a tech conference, talking about all the cool new tools instead of actually working on something useful for our users. I found myself rolling my eyes but also secretly hoping that these discussions would lead to real improvements.

The SRE Side of Things

On the SRE side, things continued to evolve. We had recently hired more people into the team and were trying to formalize some of our practices—moving away from ad-hoc solutions towards a more structured approach. This included refining our incident response process and working on automating more of our monitoring and alerting.

One challenge we faced was balancing the need for automation with the reality that sometimes, human intervention is still necessary. For instance, setting up a script to automatically restart a failing service might seem like a no-brainer, but when the issue turns out to be intermittent network flakiness, it’s not so simple. We ended up spending quite a bit of time discussing whether we should even bother with those kinds of scripts or if we should just let our operators handle everything manually.

The World Outside

Outside of work, there were some interesting developments happening in the tech world that felt like they were mirroring the chaos inside my head:

• Retro Gaming Projects: A show and tell on a retro gaming project. As someone who’s been into old-school systems since I was a kid, this resonated with me. It reminded me of the joy of building something from scratch.

• Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service. This seemed like a neat tool for security-minded users but also felt like it might be too late to compete in an already crowded space.

• Spotify vs Apple: Time to Play Fair. As someone who uses both services, this was more of a “how did we get here” kind of moment than anything else.

Reflections

March 2019 was full of these contrasts—between the technical challenges and personal frustrations, between the excitement of new tools and the reality of their limitations. It was also a month that started to hint at something bigger on the horizon. As the world began to change around us, we were already facing similar questions about how to handle uncertainty in our daily work.

For now, I just keep plugging away, trying to find some balance between these different facets of my job and life. The tech industry is a wild ride, full of both promise and pitfalls, but that’s what keeps me going.