My talk's motivation is about trying to help people get better at debugging really complex problems. I think it's really easy to become very skilled in other parts of writing software and lag behind in terms of debugging skills. It's something I feel very passionate about as an infrastructure engineer because a lot of my job is figuring out why things are going wrong. I actually don't think it's that hard, I think people often find it tricky because it's outside of their comfort zone. In my talk I go through a really complex example of a failure, but show that it's really just about applying the same step-by-step approach.

Anyone who builds and runs software in production. In terms of level, I'd say probably mid to senior plus. I try to avoid assuming any domain knowledge in the talk. I do assume a base level of programming knowledge to get there.

I'd like people to believe that they can do things that they're not so familiar with. The specific example I use in the talk is of a database clustering outage. It's about following that methodical debugging process, in which we had to dive all the way down into the binary on disk format of the database - which is a scary place that you don't normally go to.