Articles
Humane On-Call with Jeff Smith - PagerDuty
A little bit self-serving...at PagerDuty, we have been doing these monthly "video AMA's", where the community asks questions of a guest in advance, and then we get the guest to answer them on video. It's sorta like a podcast, but not.
For March, our guest was my pal Jeff Smith. We talked about how to make on-call more humane, and why that even matters.
Moving Past Shallow Incident Data - Adaptive Capacity Labs
John Allspaw digs into some of the fallacies around MTTR and similar metrics. The metaphor used that I like is this one:
This bunch of grapes is 5.6 inches across at its widest point. The mean diameter of these grapes is 0.73 inches. The median color is 195/211/86 (RGB). How do they taste?
The point is, we get very little insight about incidents by looking at most of our common metrics, because incidents all have their unique factors.
Incidents & Accidents - DevOps Minneapolis Meetup
I've been on a bit of a road show giving a talk called "Incidents & Accidents" (all props to Bridget Kromhout for the title).
It was recorded recently at the DevOps Minneapolis Meetup, where I presented it to a packed house. If you'd like to learn a little bit about the philosophy of how we look at Incident Response here at PagerDuty, this talk is for you.
Podcast Episodes
Work/Life Balance With Sasha Rosenbaum, Bill Weiss, and Katie Prizy - Arrested DevOps
We only got around to publishing this episode recently, but it was recorded last summer at DevOpsDays Chicago. So I'm promoting it now, because it touches on the very important topic of work/life balance...and how you can achieve Slack Bankruptcy after a vacation.
The B-Side of Software Development with Scott Hanselman – Greater Than Code
This episode of Greater Than Code is from last July, but I've only gotten around to listening to it recently. Scott's one of my true tech heroes, because of his genuineness, but also because I've been a fan of the Hanselman Ultimate Tools List for years. I learned a lot about how Scott teaches his kids about systems thinking, and have started to try it myself.