I was on my first podcast discussing the topic of “SRE & Full Ownership”! We recorded it on the 8th of December, it was published & announced on the 25th of January, and I finally took the time to listen to it fully - and vetted it worthy of sharing. 😅 I thought I would write a little bit about the experience.
Links to the podcast:
How it all began Link to heading
It all started with me being reached out to by Georgia (the host) at Evolution Jobs. Alex, one of the podcast guests that I had met a few weeks earlier had recommended me and had an idea for a topic that he thought we all would be able to contribute to - SRE & Full Ownership. I accepted. I felt this was a topic I would naturally be able to have a conversation around and have opinions on; The “Full Ownership” part was very close to DevOps as a Culture which is something near and dear to me - and I have been working in the SRE space for many years.
During the initial meet-and-greet with Georgia, she was very explicit about the setup. Christian, Alex, and I, would all prepare one question that we wanted to discuss with the group. These questions would then be circulated beforehand such that we all could prepare. This felt good as it allowed me to prepare a little bit with some notes in preparation for the actual recording!
Georgia also went over the exact agenda for the actual podcast recording a few weeks later: Before the actual recording, we would do a small exercise to get to know each other and relax a bit. Once that was done, the actual recording would start where we would go around the table, read our questions, and discuss it. Georgia would facilitate the conversations.
Luckily Christian, Alex, and I, all work and live in Stockholm. This allowed us to grab lunch in central Stockholm to get to know each other a little bit beforehand. That said, we made it quite clear that we were not to discuss our actual podcast topics. :)
Recording it Link to heading
I’m generally a person who does not get nervous until about 5 minutes before something starts. The podcast recording was no different. We did our socializing warmup exercise and the podcast was on. Everything was recorded over Micro$oft Teams which allowed us to use the regular chat and “raise hand” functions.
I was really happy I had prepared with notes - particularly my intro. Similarly, when giving a presentation, I find it most important to not get stuck on the starting line. Notes help. Once, we had started getting into the conversation, it was fairly easy.
The result Link to heading
Recording a podcast was fun and I feel proud of myself for doing it! Listening to my voice, my “uhms” and “ahs”, is always tricky and makes me self-critical. Ignoring that, I think I managed to squeeze in a fair amount of knowledge, opinions, and reflections in there. I was also surprised how much I learned about myself when listening to myself critically; I think I was too excited/nervous a few times which made it hard for me to find words or express myself, and I feel challenged to get better at it next time.
As with any free-flowing conversation like what we had, there is always a risk of the conversation becoming jumpy or different people talking at different lengths. I think both of those things happened in our final podcast. Possibly a bit more facilitation could have helped there.
If you haven’t had the time to listen, have a go! I hope you will enjoy it!
Addendum Link to heading
The other day I read the article How To Not Die By A Thousand Cuts. Or, How To Think About Software Quality. It reminded me how coupled SRE and QA are. The article wrote about many of the things we spoke about, but using “Software Quality” instead of “SRE”. Maybe useful don’t know!