Busra Koken

You Can’t Debug a System by Blaming a Person — Humans in Systems Blameless doesn’t mean pretending. This article explores how engineering teams can move beyond blame, debug their socio-technical systems more honestly, and turn incident reviews into real learning sp...

💌 New Article: Too often i see blamelessness reduced to “be kind”, “don’t point fingers”, or seen as "polished language", while human error still shows up in subtle ways that stop us learning from incidents, gets in the way of doing better engineering.

humansinsystems.com/blog/you-can...

Your decisions need make sense to you based on *where you are*. (Not based on the people that are ahead of you)

Before the Burnout: A Workshop on Sustaining Energy, Capability & Impact · Luma Burnout doesn’t always show up in big dramatic ways. It often starts quietly with the slow withdrawal, the heaviness of simple tasks, the feeling of being…

Here we go. It's for anyone in tech who feels stretched, capable, and quietly overwhelmed and wants to catch things early. lu.ma/6v6cf2r2

Back in April, i hold a space for small group to share burnout stories. It was wholesome and needed. It had a small fee that was donated entirely to mental health nonprofit.

Now working on creating sth more practical. An small workshop to work out on subtle signs and energy. I am excited.

If i live.. like really really long, i will say my secret to life has been the morning walks.

They are my kind of meditation. every. single. morning. 🌼

Spent the morning with 70 people who are learning python peer-to-peer. What a wonderful energy. Belonging to a community might be one of the most important thing in life.

Most of us are stuck in *making a decision* due to assuming that we can’t ever change our minds. Please know that we can. We can change our plans, adapt it hundred times but for that we need to get the first one done.

- My evening tonight -
Prepping a talk: my story about being a woman in tech. For a nonprofit organisation that helps women to get into tech.
I open my first blog from archive
Poems from 2012.
Posts on my first programming projects.
I laugh & cry.
So much time.
So many places.
So much becoming.🫠

my guiding light in life has always been authentic connection. it’s the one thing i truly trust in myself. and i believe that when we connect, human to human, we can move mountains. really.

My current reading: More Time toThink by Nancy Kline. I am half way in, and really really enjoying the simple yet cohesive and in-depth writing. Such pleasure.

My answer for now is “I dont know but I am willing to invest in its potential” If not, i will return to be the engineer manager with so much more experience of building a business.

In my opinion, owning your story is the best strategy to your success.

People often got excited that i am building my own business & ask “do you think it will work?”

I have no a strategic plan other than doing what i really like with the tools in my pocket. I will do that consistently, that is pretty much my plan. In my head, i am being the engineer that i am. 😅

Perhaps i will write about oncall anti-patterns soon.

If your on-call setup relies on people watching Slack for alerts, you’re outsourcing monitoring to human attention. It might feel flexible but it’s fragile, draining, and places a constant load on human cognition that could be used solving real problems.

Hah! Today i saw some traffic to my website from chatgpt. I wish i know what was in the chat 😅

Happening today at 16:15!

Did you know you can tune in virtually for free? Good community conferences are accessible. 🌸

www.youtube.com/live/m96ZEeP...

It will take a while to grow here right? I miss my friends on twitter. I can’t wait to find everyone here again.

I am not a person who buys domains often but this is waaaay too tempting.. 🫣

My last rehearsal before my talk at DevOpsDays AMS tomorrow: 24 min 22 seconds. Perfectly fitting to my 25 min slot. 💅

It has been 2 years since i actually wrote a new talk. I am pretty excited.

I designed my own stickers for the first time and I’m bringing them to DevOpsDays Amsterdam.

They make great sociotechnical conversation starters. Come say hi if you’re around 🌀

Humans do their best work when they feel safe and supported. There is a contingent of humans who believe they do their best work when the stakes are high, everyone is yelling, and the deadline is imminent. This is called “surviving,” and while survival is fun, it’s not good work.

I forgot how much work it is to write a *good* talk. As always like the blogposts, the editing is the work.

The Work of Building for Other Engineers | Platform & SRE Mindset — Humans in Systems This post is for anyone building platforms, tools, or systems that others rely on. It’s about the kind of engineering that makes things smoother, safer, and more human. Whether you call it SRE, DevOps...

Hah, just saw my article on hackernews. It is a new one, curious to see its adventures 🥹

Read here: It’s a reflection on what it means to be a software engineer who builds for others — especially in SRE and Platform roles.

humansinsystems.com/blog/the-wor...

I just want to shoutout to everyone who has things to say. Start anyway, and do it your own way.

Especially in this era of internet where they are so much LLM generated content; your quality content and your unique voice matter the most. 🐢

I just want to shoutout to everyone who has things to say. Start today, do it your own way. Especially in this era, where there are so many generated LLM content; I think your real thoughts and uniqueness matter the most. 🤎

What Managing Up Really Means: A Practical Guide Working with Your Manager — Humans in Systems Managing up might sound like corporate jargon, something only senior folks or managers in big companies worry about. But in reality, it’s something most of us do, consciously or not, as part of everyd...

Mixing up the topics I care about, next I wrote what “Managing Up” really means. How it is simply a collaboration skill.

This one gone kind of viral, positively overwhelmed me by being featured in 5 different tech newsletters. 🚀

humansinsystems.com/blog/a-pract...

Three Guiding Lights on Sustaining Resilience — Humans in Systems When it comes to building reliability and resilience, there’s no perfect checklist. But there are a few grounding ideas I keep coming back to, especially when things get messy.

Then I wrote about Reliabilty and Resilience Culture, how we can keep ourselves on track. This one got featured in SREweekly, and made my week at the time.

humansinsystems.com/blog/three-g...

You Don’t Have to Burn Out to Deserve a Break: A Story About Work, Rest & Rediscovery — Humans in Systems Burnout doesn’t always hit all at once. Sometimes, it creeps in slowly —so slowly that by the time you recognize it, you’re already running on empty. I didn’t realize how far I’d pushed myself until I...

Here is how it started. First I wrote about my burnout experience after 4 years. It finally felt like I have safe mental space to share it. It created such meaningful conversations.

humansinsystems.com/blog/you-don...

As a consumer myself, I am tried of bite size motivational content on LinkedIn and elsewhere. I like to think long, discuss deeper things that people don’t talk much about then distill them through my experiences.

I write monthly -quite lengthy posts. I am pretty amazed at how much my posts got featured in big newsletters. That gives me a lot of motivation to do what i like.