On Thursday, March 12th, I attended SREDay London. What made it special is that organizer Mark Pawlikowski reached out to me personally to invite me to speak, citing how much he enjoyed my talks. 💜
SREDay is a worldwide SRE-focused conference franchise, with events taking place across the globe. This was my very first SREDay, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The London conference took place at a movie theatre called Everyman Canary Wharf, in London’s Canary Wharf District, and had 3 parallel tracks. I really loved the venue. As far as movie theatres are concerned, this one had a really upscale vibe and yet was also cozy and inviting.
As a developer advocate, I’ve had a chance to attend many different conferences over the years. My favorite conferences are the more intimate ones, where it’s all about the human connection – meeting new people and having great conversations – and less about who has the flashiest booth and the best swag. Speaking of human connection, I met some familiar faces at the conference, most notably Nicolas Takashi of Coralogix, who is an OpenTelemetry maintainer, and John Hayes, who publishes the Observability 360 newsletter and invited me to write a 2025 retrospective on Observability for his newsletter. I had never met John in person before, so that was an extra treat!
Now, I can’t speak about the conference without giving a shoutout for the food, which included pizza, brownies, and cookies, and was super yummy. I consider myself a picky eater, especially at conferences, so this food ticked all the boxes.
The talk I gave that day was called Observability is a Team Sport, and is based on a blog post of the same name that I wrote in April 2025, flying home from KubeCon London, so it feels fitting to give the talk at the place the inspired the blog post in the first place. The main takeaway from the talk is that Observability isn’t something that is practiced in a silo. It concerns multiple teams in an organization, including Developers, QAs, SREs, and CI/CD teams. Most importantly, it requires cooperation and oversight from an Observability Practices team (essentially a Center of Excellence, or COE), which is responsible for defining practices, standards, and ensuring that all teams involved are speaking the same language and working towards a common goal.
As if one talk wasn’t enough, though, I was invited to give a second talk, by the lovely folks at ClickHouse, who were hosting a meetup at the conference venue, following the end of the conference. The second talk was called Uncovered: The Truth About OpenTelemetry’s Vendor Neutrality. I was happy to see some familiar faces from my earlier talk at this meetup, and after my talk, one of the attendees even told me she came to the meetup just to see my talk.
This talk is something that my friend Josh Lee and I came up with last year. The talk focuses on helping others understand what’s involved in switching OpenTelemetry back-ends, by exploring what aspect are “lift and shift”, and what aspects are not. We’ve given this talk a number of times in 2025 at CND Austria, KCD Warsaw, KCD Porto, and Open Source Observability Day, and I love that after all this time, this is still a topic that resonates with folks. This time, however, Josh wasn’t able to travel to London to deliver the talk with me, so it was a solo endeavor.
All in all, SREDay was a lovely experience. I even had a chance to meet Mark in person. He is an absolutely lovely human who has a wonderful team working with him to put on a fantastic event. I really hope I have a chance to speak at SREDay again in the near future. As far as conference experiences go, this one was top notch.
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