Busra Koken
I support humans (and their organizations) to thrive in sociotechnical systems.
Coach & Mentor • Reliability & Incident Management Consultant • SRE • ex-Engineering Manager • Visual artist
🔗 humansinsystems.com
- 💌 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)
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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. 😅
- 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.
- 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...
- Strong teams are built on trust 💬 Join Busra Koken at #DevOpsDaysAMS to learn how DevOps/SRE teams can thrive through connection, rituals, and growth. 🎟️ tickets.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-a... #speakers #TechCommunity
- It will take a while to grow here right? I miss my friends on twitter. I can’t wait to find everyone here again.
- 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 🌀
- Reposted by Busra KokenHumans 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- 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...
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View full threadI 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. 🐢
- Reposted by Busra Koken“Autonomy without safety isn’t freedom” - in SRE, building products, or org design. Tight feedback loops and solid guardrails are your friend. Good insights from @busrakoken.bsky.social in this post on Platform & SRE Mindset.
