Meet the People Behind the Pagers 

I am excited to share the news about the launch of our new podcast, Off-Call, where you’ll meet the people behind the pagers. Whether you’re a software developer, SRE, or someone intrigued by the inner workings of engineering orgs, join us on the journey to make on-call boring. 

I am Paige Cruz and your podcast host. In each episode, I delve into the realities of what it takes to keep software systems running smoothly around the clock with guests from up and down the stack. Through candid conversations, we aim to shed light on and share practices and tactics that promote sustainable on-call and operations. 

For me, this is personal. After only 5-ish years on-call, I suffered major burnout that resulted in ditching the pager for good and retiring from SRE. During my “radical sabbatical” I spent time building a paper model of the Titanic, cuddling my cats, and figuring out where to take my career. These days I’m on the other side of burnout, pretty well-rested and happy as a developer advocate at Chronosphere focusing on open source observability for today’s complex cloud native systems. It’s a great fit for me…but not exactly a repeatable path for everyone. Something I recently mentioned to a colleague sums up my perspective nicely: “If you’re experiencing more downs than ups with on-call: first you are not alone; second, you and your teammates deserve better. That’s why I’m driven to share these stories and bring you effective ways to navigate, sustain and improve on-call so that you can enjoy a long career in tech.”

Season 1 is already underway featuring conversations about networking, databases, incident response roles, SRE, mobile, and more! You can expect new episodes twice a month in your preferred format:

• 🎧 listen via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon
• 📺  watch on YouTube
• 📖 read the transcripts on the Off-Call Chronosphere page

Our first guest, Leon Adato of Kentik, had so many perls of wisdom (pun intended) to share about networking, monitoring and observability, and effective on-call onboarding. The highlights are captured in the sketchnote below:

Off-Call has three simple goals: for you to genuinely laugh at least twice an episode, learn something unexpected, and strike up a conversation with a colleague outside your domain. 

Come for the wild incident stories and stay for the practical advice to improve your on-call and operational experience! Follow the pod on Mastodon or Twitter to be the first to know when new episodes drop!