SLOconf has gone global! If you aren’t familiar with SLOconf, it is our worldwide community of reliability engineers, software builders, and technologists that are fascinated by service level objectives (SLOs). Our main event is an annual virtual conference that is as unique as it is valuable – attend-while-you-work, maximally inclusive, no-sales-pitch, and education-led.
Once a year isn’t enough, so we have monthly meetups with speakers from all over the globe on topics as diverse as using error budgets and SLOs to calculate flood risks to a McLaren racing engineer describing the parallels of race and software performance – our very own Drive to Survive.
At our January meetup, we announced a new program – Global SLOconf Captains. As the community has grown into the thousands, there is more opportunity for leadership across diverse locations. These folks will be helping to organize and promote SLOs and the SLOconf community in their local regions.
We wanted to take a minute and introduce you to the four new Global SLOconf Captains across the UK, Africa, Poland, and India.
Abby Bangser, UK
Hi all, my name is Abby Bangser and I am really excited to be a part of the SLO Conf community. I am currently an SRE at a London start-up called Duffel where we are rethinking what it looks like to build a business around air travel.
I became a software tester about 10 years ago and have been on a journey to connect software creators with their users ever since. I believe quality is in the eye of the user, so whenever we think about the quality of our products and, in turn, our software, we need to be as clear about what our users care about as we are about what they are experiencing. I find that working with SLOs has been a natural progression from my experience with Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). With BDD where we bring user expectations into our specification on how we build software and with SLOs, we bring user expectations into how we operate the software.
Kasia Zemka, Poland
My name is Kasia and I work as both Engineering Manager and Software Engineer here at Nobl9, where I began my journey with SLOs.
My adventure with programming and the IT industry began 10 years ago. At the turn of these years, I worked in various roles and fulfilled myself in many fields, including frontend development, testing, team leadership, and management. Currently, I use all the experience I gained during this time to build reliable software and spread domain knowledge. And with that said, I am glad to work at Nobl9 - a startup where I can pursue myself in this field on a daily basis.
I love sharing my experience with the community, by giving talks at conferences, meetups, and traveling around the world. I can see the influence of our domain on the entire IT industry and I want to be a part of that adoption, helping others apply good SRE practices along the way.
Bhargav Bhikkaji, India
Greetings! My name is Bhargav, and I am the founder of Tailwinds.ai which provides managed SRE services for mid and small organizations. I hold over 20+ yrs of experience in the industry, with 17 patents in the field of Computer Architecture, Networking, and Security. I have worked in many roles right from systems engineer to architect and being part of the DELL CTO organization of the Networking division.
As part of Managed services, Tailwinds is implementing SLOs for its customers and I have collated all those use cases Tailwinds has implemented and presented those during SLOConf 2021.
Ehi Enabs, Africa
Hello, my name is Ehi Enabs and I am a Site Reliability Engineer living and working in Lagos, Nigeria. The first time I came across SLOConf was in a Tweet.
I’d just finished a Cloud Engineering Bootcamp with GADS (Google African Developer Scholarship) and was facing the decision of where to pitch my tent expertise-wise. I knew I enjoyed working with data but not much else. Registering for SLOConf was a no-brainer once I found out its super cool format; all the talks were going to be released like Netflix shows. We could watch at our convenience. Pause, skip, and rewind as we please. After which we’d all hang out with the speakers on the Slack channel, asking whatever burning questions we had or just chat.
Did I mention the free stuff? We had live demos and a playground for SLO alerting, as well as distributed tracing, a free book on SLOs, plus awesome swag.
Since then, SLOConf has been the gift that keeps on giving. I have listened to some of the most brilliant people talk about how SLOs help them make better decisions and Mitigate failures at our monthly meetups.
But the best part of SLOConf has been the community. The warmth and generosity of everyone in the community make everything 99.99 times better.
Image credit: Canva
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