Reducer #6: People > Runbooks & automations
Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Reducer — a newsletter where I share everything interesting I've read or found, plus new articles and books. Let’s dive in!
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Now, let’s dive into Reducer #6!
Engineering
Ep. #8, Resilience & Chill With J. Paul Reed of Netflix @ Heavybit Podcast Network: Master Feed
The sociotechnical system actually matters, and I think for so many years we just thought, “we have enough run books and automate enough things we can ignore the dynamics of the people and how they contribute,” and that's a major shift that it's the people that make the whole thing work and you need to pay attention. Human factors are so important, and when we’re talking about devops and surprises at scale, the whole point of scaling problems is that you can anticipate a lot of them. Still, some of them are unimaginable until you get there.
Ep. #9, Auth*orization With Jeff Taylor of Okta @ Heavybit Podcast Network: Master Feed
Are you transmitting the right ideas through your API docs?
You are always worried about interpretation; this is one of the great things about it. You're putting in these building blocks out there, especially if you're building like restful models. So you're basically saying: here are all the objects how they relate to each other and then go forth and do what you need. But you do hope that the way you've constructed it is a little bit more intuitive, so customers are using it in the way you intended.
I feel it's more symbolic than anything else. They live in breed off of each other's having good samples each to get documentation having the documentation samples with his ultimate goal of having an effect of experience for the developer. On the other side something that people Overlook even when they're building APIs: we did use open API to document it, but it doesn't have that user story though, the why you would want to do this that is so key to finding the thing that you need to do at the moment.
What's interesting about that is that there are two real issues: 1) the perimeter defense, which is not allowing certain things that come in, blocking that with a strong perimeter management policy and strong RDP policy. But there's the actual domain, the dimension of the water treatment plant: should someone be allowed to change the parts per million in a particular chemical to get to a dangerous level without having some catastrophic chain of approvals getting lunch before the thing happens?
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash
Go-to-market
DevGuild: Content Strategy | Heavybit @ heavybit.com
> Today, with more than 96% of Auth0’s inbound leads driven by content, the team has captured a strong audience of loyal React, Angular and NodeJS customers using influencer strategy as the catalyst
An interesting journey to increase inbound leads. A thread on what they did may be worth it
> But rather than pinning developer outreach on a few ordained influencers, Algolia’s Brand Director Liam Boogar discusses how the company’s internal training programs aim to get 50% of the company publishing and speaking within the year.
I like this approach: can we create influencers instead of chasing existing ones? If they are our own people, it’s even better.
Writing
The #1 Secret of Highly Persuasive People: Future Pacing - Magnetic Speaking @ magneticspeaking.com
One, they have never heard of you or your product before.
Two, they have heard of your product, and now they are considering it.
Three, they bought your product, and now they want to take it to the next level.
Four, they like where they are now and don’t like the new way you are proposing.
The four states of a person to be persuaded. Great way to build empathy. Answer this for every article can help. A lot of RunOps outbound response has been: we already have A good system in place. This technique can help go past this by acknowledging that they have a system that they think is good but can be improved today.
Imagine, ten days from now, you are driving to work in a brand new Tesla.
This is powerful. I was already using “imagine” a lot after reading the book Made to Stick. Adding time is a great idea. Make it more concrete and will sure it’s fast to integrate RunOps.
How I Write Refactoring ✍️ @ refactoring.fm
I found Refactoring through one of the subscribers of SRE Teams. I really like the mix of engineering and writing/content creation. This article on how Luca writes the newsletter is inspiring. I'll start using most of these techniques in my writing process.
What is the most important point? Why is that the most important point? (what can you achieve with it) Why should people care? (what's the benefit) What is the easiest way to understand the most important point? How do you want the reader to feel? What should the reader do next? (View Highlight)
Thanks
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That’s it for this week! Hit me up if you have any thoughts, feedback, or insights to share. Otherwise, see you next week!