Black Friday—we all know what it looks like. Hundreds of people swarming stores after Thanksgiving, jostling for the best deals. But in light of COVID-19, this arrangement could be dangerous. Over the last few years, Black Friday has become a digital event, and this year should be even moreso. According to Forbes writer Richard Kestenbaum, “88% of global consumers told a Visa study they’re planning to buy gifts this holiday season.” Yet “only 20% of U.S.

In a recent fireside chat with Mohan Bhatkar, Head of Engineering for the Customer Reliability Platform at Mercari, Inc. sat down with Blameless Co-Founder Ashar Rizqi. They talked about scaling while avoiding silos, exciting day-to-day challenges, instilling a culture of empowerment, and more. Here are their top insights and the lightly edited transcript of their conversation.

At Blameless, we value every opportunity to learn. Whether it’s taking time on Focus Fridays to attend a cool webinar, or conducting retrospectives for incidents, lost deals, events, and more, learning is core to our mission. To learn even more about our craft, we decided to start a book club at Blameless. People from every team (engineering, sales, SRE, marketing, product, people, and more) attended.

We’re drinking Pumpkin Spice Lattes, lighting candles, and wearing flannel. Oh, and reading a bunch of great stuff. Here’s the November issue of SREview! This monthly zine features epic Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community.

PagerDuty is a leading on-call management platform that aggregates monitoring and alerting data, notifies on-call teams, and accelerates incident resolution. The platform is used by thousands of teams responsible for software experiences. It integrates incident triage with rapid responder mobilization, so teams can resolve incidents in real time.

Metrics are the golden ticket to knowing what’s going on with your system… or so everyone thinks. But there can be too much of a good thing. Are your metrics really doing you any favors? Are they letting you see into what your customers truly want from you? If not, you might have a problem. You might be fetishizing your metrics. The good news is you’re definitely not alone.