SRE is like stage production
ID: eb41c287-fdf1-445a-8591-b96bf544df82
SRE is like stage production – an unreal space dreamed into being, causing all sorts of real problems per the demands of the illusory structure.
Back up a bit: SRE is site reliability engineering. In the lifecycle of modern day software, success comes with a curse: scale. The insatiable lust for more grows at the pace of the market, a and the market is a lumbering beast of a different kind altogether than users. As you grow, and grow, and grow, the steps you took to cause the experience that user 103 had slowly drift apart from each other – or are ripped at the seams by force, if sewn together too tightly – as you try to accommodate user 104, and all their neighbours.
And what experience is that? In the lingo we call it a user journey – a term chosen to be sufficiently general with as little of the romance of it retained as is possible. Software can do too much, to the point that it's hard to talk about it at all. Journey is a good word for the purposes of software authors – a private experience, sights and sounds and souvenirs, unfamiliar places and people, foods, activities, a healthy (sometimes refusable) helping of unknown unknowns – but also ticket prices, accommodations, bills and receipts and budgets. A sufficiently self-contained experience, with sufficient intuitive handles to the monetizable to soothe shareholders. It's a sanitization of a more frightening, and less easily summarized, change, the frightening rendered subliminal to the familiar.
Journeys are heterotopias – real experiences born of dreams. You think to yourself, I will go to Spain; and you bring Spain into your conscious experience. Spain has different rules for you, rules that depend on why you're going. Is it a honeymoon? You likely won't be staying in hostels. Is it a business meeting? You "might" "have time" "to see the sights". How you navigate the space you are in is unlike how everybody around you is navigating the space. Your movements are circumscribed by a different purpose, a different calculus of tradeoffs. You have not really left the dream.
Likewise, software. The machine can do anything, or at any rate it can do many things. Can you, the user, do them? Without literacy in machine languages, it is likely you cannot; if it is a service being hosted on someone else's machine, it is likely they have measures in place to prevent it; and mostly it will be against your purposes. Akin to an audience in a theatre, you are here to dream what has been laid out for you to dream; akin to a passenger in an airplane, yours is not to decide where it goes. You're along for the ride. Your portion of the dream is for you to take away from here. Software in 2025, in this branch of human endeavour, prefers that you cede control.
Hence, SRE. The architecture of the modern software product is server-client – you have a little machine, I have a big machine. I will tell yours how to ask mine questions, and I will tell mine to answers all questions correctly asked. Your machine will serve you. My machine will serve yours. That the power flows in the other direction to "service" is a common feature of politics: and baby, we're the civil servants, because in the middle of all the jockeying, someone's got to keep the lights on and the actors on cue.
I like this sense of "keeping the lights on". Dreaming often increases hurt, in some of the same ways as paracetamol. It feels like relief, respite, the chance to fall asleep, or at least to carry one and get the day done; but the next time you come out of it, you might find yourself just a little bit more sensitive… And if dreaming is crashlooping on sugar, stage production is like making bread in a bakery. I like the nitty-gritty details of execution, and doing them for somebody else gives me the distance from the dreaming that makes it hurt less.
It's not how I want to live forever. In fact, it's a kind of cowardice that feeds into the architecture of the world as it is today – centralized, deferent. A kind of theatre into which we cram as many people as we can, and before them an ever-expanding stage, gaps yawning between the players.
But we don't have better ways to come together. I do and did need refuge, community; in my grief, in my ability to come too close to my own dream, I needed the chance to be straightforwardly generous.
I was richly rewarded for it. But I believe I'm done with it for a while. Enough with the bakery: it's time to get to the work of eating.
This node is a singleton!