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The most unusual SRE background you'll read this year
Emergency medicine and site reliability engineering are the same job with different patients. I didn't learn incident response from the Google SRE book — I lived it for 15 years, then found out it had a name.
Emergency OR · 2005–2020
Vital-signs monitoring — HR, SpO₂, blood pressure, baseline deviation
Diagnosis without a talking patient — incomplete information, fast inference
Surgical SOPs — no improvisation under pressure
Triage — critical vs. stable, resource allocation in seconds
Blameless death reviews — what failed in the system, not who failed
Production Systems · 2021–now
Observability — Prometheus baselines, burn-rate alerts, drift detection
Debugging live incidents — partial logs, fast root-cause analysis
Runbooks — executable, tested, versioned
Alert prioritization — P0 vs. noise, escalation policies
Blameless post-mortems — RCA, action items, pattern memory