How did you come up with your most innovative idea?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

1. Situation: Our cloud bill had been steadily increasing, but engineering
    teams lacked visibility into which workloads were driving the cost.
    Leadership wanted accountability, but SREs like me knew that finger-pointing
    wouldn’t solve anything without data.
 2. Task:I wanted to design a way to give each team ownership of their spend —
    without adding operational overhead — while also uncovering unused or
    over-provisioned infrastructure.
 3. Action:I built an internal “cost dashboard” that pulled billing data from
    our cloud provider’s API, tagged resources by team and environment, and
    visualized it by service, team, and project. But the innovative part was
    integrating it with our CI/CD workflows: before a PR deploying new infra
    could be merged, it would estimate the monthly cost impact. I also built a
    Slack bot that sent weekly team-level cost summaries and flagged idle
    resources.
 4. Result: Within two months, teams identified and shut down $8,000/month in
    unused dev resources. More importantly, it shifted the culture — infra cost
    became part of architectural discussions. Finance even started using our
    dashboard during quarterly planning instead of relying solely on billing
    exports.

Anonymous · Answer

Another person on my team came up with the idea to create a demo of our
application running in a web browser, by cross-compiling the Go application into
WebAssembly, showing how lightweight the user-application was. Our marketing
team really loved this concept, and we decided to do it.

I was tasked with creating a way for our frontend team to interact with the Go
backend that the application was written in. Our frontend team needed a way to
easily call functions within our application, and so I worked very closely with
one of our frontend engineers to design and create a TypeScript package that
provided an easy-to-use API wrapper for the application.

This wrapper significantly reduced friction between the frontend and backend
components, and made maintaining the application super easy.

I enjoyed working on this wrapper, as it required me to work closely with my
team and members of the frontend team - I also learned a lot about the
WebAssembly runtime in browsers and how to best design TypeScript APIs that can
be called easily from our React frontend.

Anonymous · Answer

I created a generic model for a postgres lease table, so a service can lease any
resource it wants. I've shared with several teams.

How did you come up with your most innovative idea?

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