"While we go to the movies for popcorn, Leon goes for architectural therapy—finding SRE life lessons in Spider-Verse metaphors and 'nightmare fuel' monitoring tools. Please welcome the host of Technically Religious and Principal Technical Marketing Engineer at Cribl, Leon Adato!"
Leon Adato on SRE Lessons from Spider-Verse and Surviving Tech Failures
At SREday NYC 2026, the ShipTalk podcast welcomed Leon Adato, Principal Technical Marketing Engineer at Cribl and host of the Technically Religious podcast, for a conversation about how engineers navigate failure and uncertainty in complex systems.
In the episode, ShipTalk host Dewan Ahmed, Principal Developer Advocate at Harness, spoke with Leon about finding lessons for reliability engineering in unexpected places—including movies like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
For Leon, the world of SRE is full of moments that feel like plot twists: systems fail, vendors disappear, and tools that once seemed essential suddenly become obsolete.
The key is not avoiding those moments—but learning how to respond to them.
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What Spider-Verse Teaches Us About Being an SRE
Leon often draws parallels between technology and storytelling, and one of his favorite examples comes from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
In the movie, Miles Morales struggles to control his powers because he is overwhelmed by pressure. At one point he literally gets stuck to a ceiling because he cannot relax.
Leon sees that moment as a perfect metaphor for engineers during a production incident.
When systems break and the pressure is high, engineers can become overwhelmed by the situation. That stress can make it harder to think clearly and move forward.
Just like Miles learning to trust himself, SREs often need to pause, refocus, and trust their experience to navigate a difficult outage.
When a Technology Choice Falls Apart
Leon’s talk at SREday focused on a scenario many engineers eventually face: watching a technology choice fail.
Sometimes the failure comes from a vendor implosion.
Sometimes the product simply becomes obsolete.
Sometimes the tool just doesn’t live up to its promises.
In those moments, engineers may feel like the decision reflects badly on them.
But Leon argues that these situations often produce valuable outcomes.
When a tool collapses or a platform fails, teams are forced to rethink assumptions, improve architecture, and make better decisions moving forward.
What initially feels like a disaster can become an opportunity to build stronger systems and stronger teams.
Owning the Glitch
Another theme Leon emphasized is the importance of owning failures openly.
When something breaks, engineers can respond in very different ways. Some people try to hide the issue or shift blame. Others acknowledge the problem and focus on fixing it.
Leon believes the second approach leads to healthier engineering cultures.
Reliability engineering depends on transparency. Systems fail, and the best teams treat those moments as opportunities to learn rather than something to hide.
Owning the glitch helps organizations improve their systems—and helps engineers grow in the process.
Final Thoughts
Leon Adato’s message for SREs is simple but powerful.
Technology will always change. Tools will come and go. Systems will occasionally fail.
What matters most is how engineers respond to those moments.
Staying calm during outages, learning from failed technology choices, and approaching problems with honesty and humility are what ultimately make teams stronger.
And sometimes, a good lesson in reliability engineering can even come from a superhero movie.
🎧 Listen to the Full Episode
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Dewan Ahmed is a Principal Developer Advocate at Harness, a company that aims to enable every software engineering team in the world to deliver code reliably, efficiently and quickly to their users. Before joining Harness, he worked at IBM, Red Hat, and Aiven as a developer, QA lead, consultant, and developer advocate. For the last fifteen years, Dewan has worked to solve DevOps and infrastructure problems for small startups, large enterprises, and governments. Starting his public speaking at a toastmaster in 2016, he has been speaking at tech conferences and meetups for the last ten years. His work is fueled by a passion for open-source and a deep respect for the tech community. Dewan writes about app/data infrastructure, developer advocacy, and his thoughts around a career in tech on his personal blog. Outside of work, he’s an advocate for underrepresented groups in tech and offers pro bono career coaching as his way of giving back.
