The Thought Drop

October 2025

13 Months Sober

The idea of sobriety is now boring to me.

Oct 20, 2025 • Robert Ross

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August 2025

The AI SRE Startup Landscape

It's hot. It's raising a lot of money. And the promise is compelling: Put the machines on-call. Here's an (updating) list of AI SRE tools I'm tracking…

Aug 1, 2025 • Robert Ross

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May 2025

On Band and Business

Every day during the summer, a group of 165 young performers wake up in a high school gym on air mattresses.

May 26, 2025 • Robert Ross

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March 2025

Six Months Sober

I don't quite crave alcohol six months in, but at times it does feel like an ex-girlfriend you lived so much life with.

Mar 10, 2025 • Robert Ross

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November 2024

Microsoft and my tinfoil journey

Either Microsoft support is wildly incompetent or there's a large scale fraud operation going on.

Nov 16, 2024 • Robert Ross

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March 2024

Three new on-call providers emerge in a week. What gives?

There's something in the water.

Mar 8, 2024 • Robert Ross

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September 2023

The alerting tool ecosystem is so far behind it hurts – and I want to fix it.

"Why hasn't PagerDuty done this?"

Sep 20, 2023 • Robert Ross

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March 2023

Your codebase is a Jenga tower

Play your blocks wisely.

Mar 6, 2023 • Robert Ross

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February 2023

Incident travel time

The real investment is how fast you get there

Feb 15, 2023 • Robert Ross

January 2022

Call me Robert

Farewell Bobby.

Jan 24, 2022 • Robert Ross

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From Engineer to CEO - Year Three

Three lessons learned over the last year as I've transitioned from a software engineer to a CEO.

Jan 20, 2022 • Robert Ross

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