Reading recommendations, week 35/2024

AI for sysadmins, a non-murderous design pattern, how to apply for SRE jobs and how to find focus doing them, and an interesting fish.

What generative AI can do for sysadmins

I’m still sceptical if LLMs can ever deliver enough value to justify the resources they require, but I’m keeping an open mind. This article is interesting because it speculates how LLMs might help not just software engineers, but ops people, too.

The “Strangler Fig” pattern

In a recent “Linux Dev Time” podcast, the hosts were appalled that a design pattern would be named “Strangler Pattern”. It’s therefore good timing that Martin Fowler updated his article on this approach to modernizing code that is very useful and not evil at all.

Cracking the SRE Interview

Regardless if the role is called Site Reliability Engineer, Service Engineer or Production Engineer, companies expect a certain combination of skills, knowledge and experience when they hire for it. This article gives a good overview over the diverse competencies applicants should bring to the table.

Deep Work for Site Reliability Engineers

Cal Newport’s book “Deep Work” is a treatise about the importance of having time to immerse yourself in a specific task that requires your full attention and skills. I can highly recommend it. This post applies learnings from the book to the work of SREs.

The Reverse Red Herring

Incident management is an inevitable part of operations work. During incident reviews, we often identify “red herrings”, i.e. things that seem relevant at first glance but aren’t. This article highlights that, equally importantly, there exists the opposite, too, and gives it a memorable name.