I’ve spoken at conferences, on podcasts, and at meetups on topics ranging from observability and reliability engineering to distributed systems and team organization.
Honeycomb & OpenTelemetry: Instrumentation Should be Boring hnycon 2021
How Honeycomb approached the OpenTelemetry project and why I believe instrumentation should fade into the background—something engineers don’t have to think much about. The best telemetry is the kind you don’t notice. Watch the talk
Best Practices Don’t Exist Screaming in the Cloud podcast, 2021
A conversation with Corey Quinn about the myth of best practices, optimizing for delivery and feedback loops, and why language bigotry is awful. We explored how context shapes every engineering decision. Listen to the episode
Vendor Neutral Instrumentation with OpenTelemetry Cloud Native Camp 2020
A hands-on demonstration of using the OpenTelemetry Collector to create custom trace pipelines. I walked through sending trace data to multiple vendors or backends simultaneously—true vendor neutrality in practice. Watch the talk
Embracing Chaos Chaos Conf 2020, with Ana Medina
Ana Medina and I shared war stories from introducing Chaos Engineering programs at various companies. We discussed what works, what doesn’t, and how to build organizational buy-in for breaking things on purpose. Watch the talk
Postmortems: From Chores to Masterclasses 2020
Learning from incidents goes far beyond traditional post-mortem analysis. I described techniques for moving past the “what went well, what went wrong, action items” template toward genuine organizational learning. Watch the talk
Chaos Engineering & Team Health The Cloudcast podcast, 2019
A conversation about the impact Chaos Engineering can have on team health and delivery practices, recorded in preparation for my talk at Velocity Berlin. Listen to the episode
Break Things on Purpose Gremlin podcast, 2019
A deep dive into the history of chaos engineering with Jacob and Rich from Gremlin. We discussed how I got started in the practice and where SRE is heading. Listen to the episode
CRDTs: Consistency without Concurrency Control Papers We Love Toronto, 2016
One of the more intimidating talks I’ve given—presenting to an academic audience without a CS degree. CRDTs caught my attention as an elegant approach to consistency in distributed systems, and I wanted to share what I’d learned. Watch the talk
Breaking the Monolith: Organizing Your Team to Embrace Microservices QCon San Francisco, 2015
A practical overview of how we deconstructed our monolith at 500px. Microservices are often misunderstood—this talk focused on the organizational and team structure changes that make the architectural shift possible. Watch the talk