Easy save. I could smother it, kill the play. Instead I kick it out to their other forward. Not a mistake. A choice. I’m bored and my team’s up four goals and I want to make another save. So I manufacture chaos, create my own work, turn an easy night into something that feels like hockey. That’s the first thirty-six minutes. The second half, I’m making four saves in a row and watching the fifth one trickle past my pad anyway.

I was standing outside a conference room watching my team lie to another team about a database outage. It was day four. Through the glass door, I could see the engineer on the call, explaining with impressive confidence that our cloud provider was having issues. Any minute now, they said, the vendor would resolve it and services would come back up. I pulled up the provider’s status page. Green across the board.

Well, maybe not everything. Look, being a goalie is objectively ridiculous. You strap on forty pounds of equipment designed to protect you from frozen rubber traveling at speeds that would make physicists frown. Then you stand in front of a net and dare people to shoot at you. It’s a strange job. But here’s the thing: being a goalie is basically the same job as running ops, or security, or honestly, any part of software development where you’re the one who has to keep the thing from breaking.

If I didn’t have to spend a bunch of time moving virtual machines around, this probably wouldn’t matter very much. But, alas, I did find myself building zfs raid arrays a few times and couldn’t seem to remember what I wanted where. 🧂 Take with a conservative grain of salt. RAID Type Min Disks Usable Capacity Fault Tolerance Performance Notes Notes Striped 1+ 100% of total None Fastest read/write, no redundancy Equivalent to RAID0 Mirror 2+ 50% of total 1 disk per mirror vdev Excellent read, good write, fast recovery Equivalent to RAID1 in traditional RAID RAIDZ1 3+ N - 1 1 disk failure Slower write, decent read Similar to RAID5 RAIDZ2 4+ N - 2 2 disk failures Slower write, decent read Similar to RAID6 RAIDZ3 5+ N - 3 3 disk failures Slowest write, decent read For high fault tolerance ZFS RAID10 4+ (even) 50% of total 1 disk per mirror vdev Best balance of performance + redundancy Stripe of mirrors (manual mirror vdevs) dRAID 3+ Varies (RAIDZ-like) Parity-based (configurable) Improved resilver vs.

Starting fresh with a new team—whether it’s stepping into the net as a goalie or joining a company as a Site Reliability Engineer—comes with a rush of excitement, uncertainty, and the need to quickly adapt. In both worlds, you’re expected to understand the system, earn trust fast, and make the right decisions under pressure. This piece explores the parallels between guarding the crease in ice hockey and taking on infrastructure responsibilities in a new engineering org: the importance of communication, learning team dynamics, managing risk, and building confidence through early wins.