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Page It to the Limit

Welcome to Page It to the Limit

Myths About Running Software In Production

The hosts start out with their pet peeves: which myths about running software in production would we like to debunk?

Scott: “As a developer, I focus on APIs… So the myth I think about is that software engineers will just ‘get’ your API with very little documentation or [code] samples. While some will, to fully support your community you need to have good documentation, good sample code, and good tools to help people get started.”

We also cover “root cause” vs “contributing factors”, the role of psychological safety in comparison to picking the right tools, and the obligation software engineers have to manage their software in production if they want to write “good” code.

Building more resilient systems & better quality of life

The goal of this podcast is to discuss practices that build both more resilient systems and better quality of life for the people supporting them. In order to do that, which topics would we like to cover?

Matt: “I think a key practice is the idea of learning from incidents. And what I mean by that is how can we get better at actually learning and taking incidents as gifts and not just something we react to and create action items and tickets about.”

We also cover collaboration, development tools, and the importance of diverse viewpoints.

Topics of particular interest

What are each of the hosts focused on?

Julie: “How do we work together to own our code in Production? When there’s a resistance from software engineers to owning that code in production, I’d like to know why.”

The hosts each discuss their own interests which span across psychological safety, developer education & experience, open source software communities, emergency response systems, chaos engineering & game days, human factors, and learning from incidents.

Personal Intros

But wait, WHO are these hosts?

George: “I hated being on-call. I mean loathed being on-call. So many on-call disaster stories that just took a toll on my personal life… Ironically, I ended up working at PagerDuty… It turns out there’s a lot we can do to make [on-call] better and there’s this good Venn diagram of interests that come together when we talk about emergency response.”

Everyone does a quick roundtable introduction.

Why are we all now focused on incident management?

The hosts find common ground from their diverse backgrounds.

Julie: “I started [in IT] as a recruiter which means I got to hear why people were leaving their jobs… What made them miserable?… To have the opportunity to help make people’s lives easier was one I couldn’t pass up.”

Everyone shares a brief version of their origin stories. Scott continues to focus on tools. LOL

What’s with the name Page It To The Limit?

Mysteries are revealed.

What’s on the horizon for content?

The hosts talk about the next few episodes and what to expect on the show.

Episode source