How a Nike Engineering VP Keeps Her Skills and Knowledge Current
I am often asked, “What do you do to stay current?”
Which is a really great question, especially for anyone in senior leadership of an engineering organization. It’s easy to get so consumed by your day-to-day work that you become disconnected from the industry. I know this because I was in exactly this situation about eight years ago.
It was 2011, and I was knee deep in a digital transformation. I was leading a team that was transitioning to Agile and optimizing for speed. I was learning a lot, and at one point, a member of our infrastructure team pulled me into a demo where they had automated provisioning a server. Since my background was in infrastructure, this was a really exciting thing for me to see. Not only had the team taken the effort from weeks to hours, but, as they said to me, “we are now treating infrastructure as code.”
That last statement caught me off guard. I had never heard that before, and I started asking a lot of questions. One of the engineers said, “If you would like to learn more about this and a bunch of other recent trends in the industry, let me make an introduction.” He then introduced me to John Allspaw, who was the SVP of Infrastructure and Operations at Etsy at the time. He was also co-chairing the Velocity conference.
This introduction was pivotal for me and sent me on my learning journey. From there, I decided to attend Velocity for the first time. Honestly, my primary motive was to meet John in person and to continue our discussions. I wasn’t sure how much of the content would be relevant for me, since it was mostly focused on deep engineering topics. But it turned out to be one of the best professional experiences I’ve ever had. Not only did I learn a ton, but I also started following way more people on Twitter who I might not otherwise have followed. I realized that I could stay pretty current by following key people in the industry. I could also gain exposure to important and relevant communities in the tech industry. In fact, this is when I was first exposed to the DevOps community and realized how much people are willing to share.
So, why am I sharing this? I recently had the opportunity to attend two amazing conferences, and it gave me the chance to reflect and think about why I continue to attend events like these, even as a senior leader: It’s because I strive to be a lifelong learner and because I have learned — and continue to learn — so much from the community. I also make invaluable connections with folks I may end up getting the opportunity to work with some day.
In this two-part post, I will first discuss my learnings at Monitorama in Portland, Oregon.
PART I: MONITORAMA
I have wanted to attend Monitorama for years. Every time I tried to get tickets, it was sold out. I recently moved to Portland, Oregon, in order to work for Nike Digital Engineering, and I thought: “Now I have to go. I live here. This is my chance!” Fortunately, I was able to get tickets, and now I’m going to share what I loved about it and what I learned.
First, I love that Monitorama is a single-track conference and that it’s focused on open source. It was great to be able to see every talk and also have the speakers incorporate and reference previous speakers. This enhanced the experience of networking during breaks, as everyone had just seen the same content. Now, I was particularly excited for this event because I’ve been doing a lot of reading about observability and trying to shift the focus away from traditional monitoring. I was really looking forward to hearing from others about how they are approaching this transition.
Monday morning kicked off with BuzzFeed site reliability engineer, Logan McDonald, talking about optimizing for learning. Jackpot! This talk was a great combination of culture and leadership and included suggestions for how to continuously learn. I loved this quotation she shared from Stanford University psychology professor, Carol Dweck: “Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to failure.” This resonated with me, as we in the industry — and at Nike — try to encourage learning from failure. Often, people are told they succeeded because they are smart. Logan suggested that, instead, we tell people that they succeeded because they worked hard. She also spoke of the importance of encouraging a growth mindset.
Jamie Wilkinson’s talkwas incredibly interesting, as well. Wilkinson is a Site Reliability Engineer at Google. He spoke about complex systems and alerting on symptoms instead of causes. This is extremely relevant to the work we are doing at Nike to focus more on observability and making sure we are proactively alerting teams before our consumers experience an issue.
Another talk I really enjoyed was from Peter Bourgon called, “Observability — the Hard Parts.” Bourgon is currently driving the engineering observability initiative at Fastly. This was particularly interesting to me, as we recently added “observability” to Nike’s engineering principles. He spoke of the importance of practicing empathy, and I really liked this quote from him: “We need to meet the teams where they are, understand their problems and show where we can ease the pain.” I think this applies to leadership engagement, too. As leaders, we need to practice empathy with our teams. We need to come to the work and not expect the work, or the teams, to come to us.
Aditya Mukerjee, who is on the observability team at Stripe, talked about alert fatigue. I really liked the way he connected alert fatigue to decision fatigue. Alert fatigue causes the inability to make decisions and increase in frequency of mistakes. “If we don’t trust alerts, we won’t be able to trust each other,” he said. “If we don’t trust each other, we won’t be able to trust ourselves.” Another key takeaway was how important it is to acknowledge that people are fundamentally part of the alerting ecosystem. The alerts are one thing, but how you respond to them and what actions you take are critical components of the ecosystem. This talk directly connected to work we are doing at Nike to align on shared outcomes and using data to inform decisions and build trust.
Andy Domeieralso gave a great talk about automation, and I liked his distinction between monitoring and observability. Domeier has been in Technology Operations leadership at SPS Commerce for 13 years. He’s currently leading the Systems Operations, Reliability Engineering and Continuous Improvement teams. “Monitoring is about taking action,” he said. “Observability is about enabling discovery.” He also talked about how important it is to visualize relationships and dependencies, which is super relevant to our world at Nike. We have been very focused on dependency management, including identification and minimization. But we can’t focus on minimizing dependencies if we can’t make them visible.
Prateek Rungta, a software engineer on Uber’s observability team, talked about Uber’s 4K microservices, central observability platform used for capacity-planning, real-time alerting and tracking business metrics. He also shared their open source M3DB. This sparked a conversation with one of my senior directors about our use cases for time series data. Rungta also shared that Uber is planning to move off of Cassandra, which is a path we are also on, so it was nice to hear another technology company making that same decision because of the scale of challenges they were facing.
One thing that is always challenging for me at any event is vendor engagement. I am usually at a conference to learn from practitioners — not to hear a sales pitch. However, I know that a lot of these events are not possible without the sponsors, and what I really appreciated about the Monitorama approach is that every sponsor pitch included a demo. It’s so much more powerful to see the products in action.
In addition to the amazing content, I also met a bunch of new people my network both in the local Portland tech community and on Twitter. Overall, it was a fantastic event, and I would definitely attend again.
I will be posting more about the events I’ve been attending and how much I’ve learned. Frankly, this one was long overdue, so I intend to turn my posts around much quicker going forward. #alwayslearning
