Jeremy Proffitt is the author of Becoming a Rockstar SRE, we got the chance to sit down and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.
Q: What are your specialist tech areas?
Jeremy: Lovingly referred to as a technology firefighter by my wife, my specialties are troubleshooting and reliability of technology. Beyond just SRE and DevOps skill sets, I have spent decades developing in desktop, web and embedded technologies through a multitude of languages, databases, architecture and technologies.
Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Jeremy: For me, SRE is more than just statistics and technology, understanding the business and people involved in building reliability is a strong part of the continuous improvement journey, an area where I thought it was well overdue to share this side with those aspiring to be an SRE.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Jeremy: Having worked almost three decades as a developer, DevOps engineer, SRE and leader now, my experience in this field has served as my research to build a one of a kind SRE book.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Jeremy: Like many things, we do by learning. The last chapter was far easier than the first. Beyond that, time in my life is more valuable than money – so finding time to write a book, can be a challenge.
Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
Jeremy: Automation of alerting and monitoring sure are coming in strong in the SRE world, however, I think there will always be a place for the human and business sides of the house to be heard. No all alerts have the same value or impact – and it’s hard to define business impact with a generic, made for all platforms, Artificial Intelligence algorithm.
Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
Jeremy: Beyond the technology and statistics of SRE, driving continuous improvement requires working with other non technology groups like product and business, understanding these relationships during this journey is key in driving reliability and is so often forgotten in SRE discussions.
Q: What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away with from the book?
Jeremy: Site Reliability Engineers are broadly skilled in so many areas, but in this book, we concentrate on the core of those, which for us has been at the heart of reducing down time.
Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
Jeremy: Be responsible, hungry and learn everything you can as an abstract, not as an absolute. And ensure you understand the why, because technology choices are not always about the technology, with security, business and cost major factors these days, they play high stakes in driving solutions today.
Q. How would you describe your author’s journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
Jeremy: It’s not easy, but it’s absolutely helped me frame out what I believe and why. I have always known what is the right direction, having to define it on paper, wow, you learn so much about your own self.
Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?
Jeremy: I read a lot of Reddit, TLDR, Linked in and attend a fair number of conferences including AWS re:Invent and SRECon.
Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?
Jeremy: I set aside large chunks of time for writing, but always kept the chapter outlines with me, that way I could make a quick note here and there. I found this worked well.
Q. What is that one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?
Jeremy: You’ll struggle to write, you’ll struggle for time, you’ll struggle to find your voice – but when you do and it clicks, it just flows!
You can find Jeremy’s book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here
