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Showing posts from October, 2025

The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Mindset: Reliability through Engineering and Culture

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  Introduction Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that applies software engineering principles to IT operations in order to create highly stable and scalable systems. As Google’s Ben Treynor (who founded SRE at Google) famously described: “SRE is what happens when a software engineer is tasked with what used to be called operations.” In practice, this means approaching traditional ops work with an engineering mindset – building tools and automation to manage systems, measuring and treating reliability as a feature of the product, and continually improving processes. The SRE mindset shifts teams from reactive “firefighting” to proactive resilience engineering, making reliability a first-class concern rather than an afterthought in software services. This article explores the core principles of the SRE mindset and how they benefit developers, operations engineers, and technical managers alike. We will discuss why reliability is considered a feature of the product, how...

Getting Started with Site Reliability Engineering - SRE (Инженерия надежности сайтов)

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Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that combines aspects of software engineering and applies them to infrastructure and operations problems. SRE teams are responsible for ensuring the reliability and performance of large-scale, distributed systems. These teams play a crucial role in modern tech companies, where the uptime and stability of online services are of utmost importance. What are SRE Teams? SRE teams are responsible for designing, building, and maintaining systems that are highly reliable and scalable. They bridge the gap between development and operations by applying software engineering principles to operations tasks. SRE teams focus on automating tasks, improving system reliability, and minimizing downtime. Google is often credited with popularizing the concept of SRE, and its SRE team is known for developing many best practices in this field. How are SRE Teams Organized? Roles: SRE teams typically consist of Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) who share re...

ASCII, Unicode, and UTF-8 — a Practical Guide

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  Text looks simple until you ship it. Then “é” becomes “é”, emoji break your logs, and databases refuse to sort correctly. This article gives you a solid mental model of  how text becomes bytes , why  ASCII  still matters, how  Unicode  fixes the global text problem, and why  UTF-8  is the default encoding you should reach for. 1) Characters, code points, bytes Character : the abstract “letter/symbol” humans see (e.g.,  A ,  é ,  🙂 ). Code point : a number assigned to a character. In Unicode,  A  is U+0041,  é  is U+00E9,  🙂  is U+1F642. Encoding : a method that turns code points into  bytes  (binary) and back. Computers store and transmit  bytes , not characters. Encodings are the  agreement  for mapping between the two. 2) ASCII: the OG mapping (7-bit) ASCII  defines 128 code points (0–127). It fits in 7 bits, commonly stored as a full byte (the top bit is 0). That’s ...