Learning from incidents (Ship It! #21)

Things go wrong all the time. We all make mistakes. And that is okay. What is not okay, is to think that it won’t happen, or that there will be someone else around when it does. In that moment, it doesn’t matter who wrote that module, package or microservice. But there is a better way to think about this, and there is an approach that makes people actually look forward to incidents.

It all starts with thinking of incidents as opportunities to learn, and then share those learnings with everyone, so that you can all improve. In this episode, Gerhard is joined by Stephen Whitworth and Chris Evans, incident.io co-founders, and former Staff Engineers at Monzo.

They get it, we get it, and now you can get it too.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
• PlanetScale – PlanetScale is the only serverless database platform you can start in an instant and scale indefinitely with unlimited connections. Never think about database servers again. Everything you want to control is available through the beautifully designed PlanetScale CLI. Learn more and start your database in seconds at planetscale.com
• Honeycomb – Guess less, know more. When production is running slow, it’s hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? With Honeycomb you get a fast, unified, and clear understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. Join the swarm and try Honeycomb free today at honeycomb.io/changelog
• FireHydrant – The reliability platform for teams of all sizes. With FireHydrant, teams achieve reliability at scale by enabling speed and consistency from a service deployment to an unexpected outage. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io

Featuring:

• Chris Evans – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Stephen Whitworth – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

• Linear - The issue tracking tool you’ll enjoy using
• Loom - Record quick videos of your screen and cam
• incident.io - Product Roadmap
• CircleCI - Continuous Integration and Delivery
• Heroku - Cloud Application Platfrom
• Incidents are for everyone - Stephen’s favourite blog post
• Learning from incidents - Formula 1 - Chris’ favourite blog post
• Why more incidents is no bad thing - Gerhard’s favourite blog post

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!