Welcome to the Beaver Duty substack, where the absurdity of modern tech meets the reality of building and operating it.
Here, you'll find satirical survival guides for navigating the world of SRE, Cloud, DevOps, and Data, written with a straight face and a raised eyebrow. Each story is packed with dry humor, exaggerated truths, and just enough painful accuracy to make engineers wince, laugh, and maybe rethink their architecture.
But this isn’t just a collection of jokes at the industry’s expense.
Alongside the satire, you’ll also find more serious reflections on the same themes: complexity in distributed systems, the trade-offs of modern cloud strategies, the organizational patterns that shape infrastructure decisions, and what resilience looks like when the pager goes off at 2am.
Whether you’re an SRE, platform engineer, data wrangler, or just someone wondering why your cloud bill looks like a phone number, this blog aims to entertain and occasionally inform you.
Tone: Dry.
Perspective: Experienced but curious.
Goal: Laugh, then learn.
Why Beavers?
Beavers are nature’s original site reliability engineers.
They build resilient systems from unreliable parts. They manage water flow like seasoned traffic controllers. And when something breaks, they don’t panic, they patch it with sticks, mud, and an impressive sense of purpose.
Like SREs, beavers aren’t flashy. Their work is often invisible when things are going well. But when things get sour? They are the first line of defense.
To all the beavers in the IT industry. Love.
