1 year Chronosphere Work-a-versary

Today is a milestone day (at least according to the HR portal) as it is my 1 year work-a-versary with Chronosphere.

As this is my ~personal~ blog I don't tend to talk about my workplace so much since I have many many other channels for doing so but wanted to take stock of a whirlwind year and share some reflections.

Are the Reasons I Joined Chronosphere Still Resonating?

^ I think is one of the most important questions to continually ask yourself about your role/employer. Especially with startups where the winds of change upend even the most beautiful of quarterly plans and double especially in this climate of layoffs and private equity acquisitions.

The answer is a resounding YES

✅ Solid product with an exciting and sensible roadmap
✅ Transparent and non-sleazy billing and sales approaches
✅ Investment into open source observability
✅ Established remote-first culture

Am I Looking For A New Job?

Big N-O from me. This is the first year I am not taking my own advice to interview and check market rates annually.

I am exceedingly happy with having a manager who coaches me, a platform I am proud to promote, unlimited PTO (which I actually do use), total compensation that more than pays the bills, and zero on-call duties.

All in all this post from Kris sums up why I'm staying and why I've left almost all previous employers

Is Marketing my Final Career Switch?

😈 of course not. So far I've gotten experience with

• HR
• Recruiting
• IT
• Engineering
• Operations
• Marketing

I may just complete the full bingo card and toss in Finance (with the rise of FinOps I could totes see this for me) and Legal (except no thx to law school) and build on my B.S. Engineering Management (which kinda is BS but that's another blog post) and have my own "real world MBA".....

All in all this past year I have learned just how much work goes into marketing and sales in general and specifically for B2B SaaS Developer Tooling (my career speciality so it seems). I promise that marketers aren't sitting in conference rooms thinking of ways to get you to unsubscribe from their newsletter even though it feels like that sometimes. Mostly I've been surprised at how thoughtful and intentional we are about surfacing the right messaging and the right time to the right person.

For now there's still lots for me to learn and explore within marketing so I am not done yet!

Highs and Lows of Developer Advocacy wrt to SRE

Highs of Developer Advocacy

Sharing my experiences and lessons learned at the conferences and communities that shaped my philosophy and approach to reliability work and observability - namely SRECon, Monitorama, Learning From Incidents, DevOpsDays. Truly I do not wish burnout on anyone and it's gratifying to put my thoughts and work out into the world in hopes of sparing someone from this fate.

Lows of Developer Advocacy

it took <1y for me to hit Silver status and with my estimates I'll be at Gold post-KubeCon. That's a lot of nights in hotels and a lot of interstitial time at airports waiting for connections.

What's next for Paige?

Going to be slowing down travel for the next year, focusing on more PNW and West Coast conferences and meetups closer to home.

Learning more about FinOps and helping organizations fold the cost of observability in addition to cloud spend into their FinOps practices.

aaaaaaand launching a pod/video-cast series (vodcast? what are we calling these???)

CAT TAX