Preparing for the Unexpected

What is the work you are doing today?

I work at the Financial Times as a Principal Engineer. I support the development of FT.com, the website and mobile applications. There's two things going on in our department at the moment that I'm supporting. One is we're relaunching a whole bunch of teams. Getting all of those teams kicked off and started at the beginning of this year. Quite a lot of energy going into that, but it's all quite exciting. We're trying to address in a microservices world the issue of ownership as part of that. So the outcome should be we have a whole bunch of teams with full ownership of everything.

What are your goals for the talk?

One of them is to use this as a reason to deep dive into something I'm quite interested in, incident management and reliability engineering. I'm really interested in telling the story that we have had at the FT over the last year about how we've handled incidents. And I want to get across that It's possible for engineers on the ground to make space for incident management and training and get people interested in the operational side of running systems. I think it's quite interesting. The FT is similar to a lot of companies where engineers have many different responsibilities and sometimes you have to jump into incident management, taking it all the way to producing an incident report.

What are the core personas for the talk?

This talk is for engineers, and any other discipline that would get value out of learning from incidents.

Could you share a few key takeaways?

I want to get across that your company's previous incidents are a treasure trove for preparing for what's to happen. We keep a record of all of our incidents at the FT and we review them regularly. There's always new things to learn even if they've happened in the past. And new people provide new eyes on those previous incidents and things that we didn't know at the time.