1) Coaching Team Members Through Debugging
When junior engineers struggle with incidents, I walk them through the scientific method of debugging:
- Reproduce the problem.
- Collect evidence (logs, metrics, traces).
- Form a hypothesis.
- Test, measure, refine.
For example, in a memory leak case, I let a junior take the heap dump and explain findings, stepping in only to validate conclusions.
2) Introducing SRE Practices to New Teams
In teams without SRE culture, I start small:
- Define a single SLO for a critical endpoint.
- Introduce a burn-rate alert tied to that SLO.
- Run a blameless postmortem after the first incident.
This creates buy-in without overwhelming the team with jargon.
3) Prioritizing and Delegating in High-Pressure Situations
During outages, prioritization is key:
- Delegate evidence gathering (thread dumps, logs) to one engineer.
- Keep communication flowing with stakeholders (status every 15 minutes).
- Focus leadership on mitigation and rollback decisions.
After stabilization, I lead the postmortem, ensuring learnings feed back into automation, monitoring, and runbooks.