Interview with a Site Reliability Engineer @tutoriaLinux

Uploaded June 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

I'm interviewing a friend and coworker who is a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). She's been doing some form of DevOps for many years now, and has a LOT of experience that's relevant to early- and mid-career folks.

0:00 Introduction
1:28 SRE and Devops Project Work
3:05 Company Size and Specialization
5:24 Jobs before tech
6:00 Getting into tech
6:50 University Degree and Skills
8:20 Why get into tech?
9:29 Dave's passion ninja 10x engineer rant
10:06 Applying to tech jobs
10:50 Experience as a Tech Apprentice
12:51 Advice: Starting from Zero

14:00 Core Skill: Solo Learning
15:27 Most interesting DevOps/SRE work
18:11 Different company cultures
19:13 Ideal company culture
22:52 Surprises when getting into tech
24:54 It's OK not to know everything
26:10 Skills that new tech people neglect
29:54 Tech skills that people neglect
32:35 Where is DevOps going in the future?

34:27 "I think it could get weird"
38:00 It's crazy to "plan" for the future
39:00 Erin's final advice to new tech people

Interview with a Site Reliability Engineer

$Configuration Management With Ansible: A Whirlwind Tour A crash course on deployment and configuration management with Ansible. This video acts as a basic Ansible tutorial (a general introduction to Ansible for beginners). Anyone using Linux for System Administration, DevOps, or Development should be familiar with this tool. Why choose Ansible vs Chef or Puppet? -easiest to get started with -no agents, no client/server -done over SSH -Ansible can scale to thousands of hosts -Ansible uses Python, yay! Code snippets on Github: https://github.com/groovemonkey/tutorialinux/tree/master/ansible_basics ######################## Ansible in 10 minutes -we are not covering everything, just the stuff I think is most important -these are the things youll be doing with Ansible MOST of the time ### Super-simple ansible tutorial: apt-get install ansible We want to set up a new machine # prep the machine add sshkey (or install sshpass and use ask-pass) install python, python-apt -install zsh tmux -SSH config file (templating) ansible-playbook -i hosts site.yml # Ansible Development Workflow: -write some stuff -run some stuff -check if everything actually worked -fix bugs, run again -repeat ################# A larger Ansible project mkdir -p basics/{group_vars,roles}/ touch group_vars/all touch site.yml mkdir -p roles/common/{files,handlers,tasks,templates} touch /roles/common/{handlers,tasks}/main.yml tree . Step-by-step project-based Linux course for beginners: https://www.udemy.com/course/hands-on-linux-self-hosted-wordpress-for-linux-beginners/?referralCode=19C0A7DEE2FD53C9C09D Free Linux Sysadmin Course Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtK75qxsQaMLZSo7KL-PmiRarU7hrpnwK DigitalOcean referral link: https://m.do.co/c/0380a1db56a6 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tutorialinux Official Site & e-mail list: https://tutorialinux.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/tutorialinux Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tutorialinux Podcast: http://kernelpanicpodcast.com$

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