Changes are scary. Changes in production are scarier, especially if you haven’t done them before. Ideally, you’d have pipelines and staging environments, and everything just gets handled automatically.
Unfortunately, reality isn’t always ideal, and you’re faced with having to “yolo” a change; implementing something without waiting for everything to be perfect.
The aviation industry has spent decades operating safely in environments where not everything is known in advance. It relies on shared attitudes, behaviours, and simple checklists to help people make good decisions under pressure.
In this talk, I’ll draw on those ideas and apply them to platform engineering, looking at how to recognise when to commit to a change and when it’s safer to abort and try again.
This talk is aimed at SREs, Platform Engineers, or anyone who works on a production “thing”.
It is a high‑level, conceptual talk that bridges two domains, aviation and platform engineering, and focuses on decision‑making and safety when conditions are less than ideal.
Chelsea is a Senior Network DevOps Engineer at REANNZ who specialises in infrastructure automation, spanning networks, systems, and the platforms that support them. An expert generalist, they enjoy working across disciplines and technologies, focusing on maintainability, clarity, and improving how teams operate complex systems. Chelsea is also an active contributor to the Python community in Aotearoa and Australia.
