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Posts by Nick Travaglini

Nick Travaglini

Senior Technical Customer Success Manager

Nick is a Technical Customer Success Manager with years of experience working with software infrastructure for developers and data scientists at companies like Solano Labs, GE Digital, and Domino Data Lab. He loves a good complex, socio-technical system. So much so that the concept was the focus of his MA research. Outside of work he enjoys exercising, reading, and philosophizing.

Teams & Collaboration   Culture  

Determining a CoPE’s Efficacy—and Everything After

As discussed in the first article in this series, a Center of Production Excellence (CoPE) is a more or less formal, provisional subsystem within an...

Software Engineering   Culture  

A CoPE’s Duty: Indexing on Prod

Building a center of production excellence (CoPE) starts with indexing on production. Here’s why. Odds are that a software engineer today is really focused on...

Observability  

An Ode to Events

At this point, it’s almost passé to write a blog post comparing events to the three pillars. Nobody really wants to give up their position....

Software Engineering   Culture  

A CoPE’s Guide to Alert Management

Alerts are a perennial topic, and a CoPE will need to engage with them. The bounds of this problem space are formed by two types...

Software Engineering   Culture  

The CoPE and Other Teams, Part 2: Custom Instrumentation and Telemetry Pipelines

The previous post laid out the basic idea of instrumentation and how OpenTelemetry’s auto-instrumentation can get teams started. However, you can’t rely only on auto-instrumentation....

Software Engineering   Culture  

The CoPE and Other Teams, Part 1: Introduction & Auto-Instrumentation

The CoPE is made to affect, meaning change, how things work. The disruption it produces is a feature, not a bug. That disruption pushes things...

Software Engineering   Culture  

Staffing Up Your CoPE

Getting the right people working in the CoPE is crucial to success because these change agents must limber up the organization and promote the flexibility...

Software Engineering   Culture  

Independent, Involved, Informed, and Informative: The Characteristics of a CoPE

In part one of our CoPE series, we analogized the CoPE with safety departments. David Woods says that those safety departments must be: independent, involved,...

Software Engineering   Culture  

Establishing and Enabling a Center of Production Excellence

Software is in a crisis. This is nothing new. Complex distributed systems are perpetually in a state far from equilibrium, operating in what Richard Cook...

Teams & Collaboration   Software Engineering  

Evolving by Involving 

In this post, we’re going to lay out the guiding principle that unifies the diverse world of CS as we see it—and show how we...

Teams & Collaboration   Observability  

Autocatalytic Adoption: Harnessing Patterns to Promote Honeycomb in Your Organization

When an organization signs up for Honeycomb at the Enterprise account level, part of their support package is an assigned Technical Customer Success Manager. As...

Observability  

Sense and Signals

Part of understanding a complex, distributed software system as a socio-technical system means taking seriously that the signals the stewards receive aren’t just chatter....