Rich Hsieh, Core Engineering Manager at Meetup
Back in July 2016, I asked myself the question, “What would an SRE team look like at Meetup?” Given the opportunity to try SRE at Meetup, I came up with a 6 month roadmap to change Meetup’s current processes. Out of this came new approaches to incident escalation, postmortems and playbooks.
Over the course of 6 months, I found unexpected allies in the company, improved broken processes and made strides toward a culture of learning, transparency and documentation -- changing old habits for the better.
If you’re looking to start SRE at your company or want to learn how small tweaks can lead to big wins, come hear how I created a pilot program of SRE at Meetup. I will go over a month-by-month breakdown of the SRE team’s tasks, including getting buy-in from leadership, rallying support from stakeholders, and identifying areas of impact, sharing anecdotes along the way.
Of course, this is just the beginning. SRE at Meetup is by no means near it’s full potential and there are still some big problems to address, but hopefully these steps will inspire you and your team to get on the right track.
Rich Hsieh, Core Engineering Manager at Meetup
Rich Hsieh is a Core Engineering Manager at Meetup. Having joined Meetup in July 2007, he's seen Meetup grow from a small startup to a company that's now 200 strong. During his time at Meetup, he's worn several hats, developing and architecting features on the site, working on-call shifts, introducing SRE, and now managing a team of engineers. In his spare time, you'll find him organizing and training for another marathon with his Meetup, Dashing Whippets Running Team, in NYC.
Open Access Media
USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted after the event are also free and open to everyone. Support USENIX and our commitment to Open Access.
author = {Rich Hsieh},
title = {Changing Old Habits: {Meetup{\textquoteright}s} Path to {SRE}},
year = {2017},
address = {San Francisco, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}