Ethical and Sustainable On-Call

Abstract:

It's 2:30 AM and you hear your phone buzz. You reach over and see an alert from PagerDuty. That new service your team has been working on for a few weeks has crashed and you don't know the first thing about debugging Clojure apps. After crawling out of bed and logging into your company's VPN you discover your co-workers have left you absolutely no documentation on what to do when "bad things happen". You sit there wondering if you'll be getting back to bed tonight.

Sound familiar? It doesn't have to be this way. On-call doesn't have to be a pit of lost productivity and stress. On-call can actually be a very rewarding experience that improves application stability, increases uptime, and avoids those dreaded 2:30 AM PagerDuty notifications. Let's start thinking about on-call for Humans.

Speaker: Jon Daniel

Ambitious developer. Opinions proven correct through catastrophe. Recovering startup junkie.