Postmortems

A project post-mortem is a process used to identify the causes of a project failure (or significant business-impairing downtime), and how to prevent them in the future. This is different from a Retrospective, in which both positive and negative things are reviewed for a project.

This type of activity classifies as “important” and “urgent”
When the outage is over, however, we need to consciously shift our focus back to what’s “important” and “not urgent”. If we don’t then we risk spending time on distractions and busywork
The discipline of writing things down requires us to take a pause, collect our thoughts and draft an impartial, sober, and fearless account of what happened, how we dealt with it, what we learned, and what steps we’re taking to fix it.

When faced with service interruptions, we drop everything in our hands and perform operational backflips 24×7 until the service is restored for all customers.

Find a Postmortem

What was the root cause? What turn of events led to the server failover? What roadworks cut what fiber? What DNS failures happened, and where? Keep in mind that a root cause may’ve set things in motion months before any outage took place.

What steps did we take to identify and isolate the issue? How long did it take for us to triangulate it, and is there anything we could do to shorten that time?

Who / what services bore the brunt of the outage?

How did we fix it?

What did we learn? How will those learnings advise our process, product, and strategy?

opportunity Postmortem

Successful outage resolutions go hand in hand with comprehensive postmortems. If you don’t take the time to document things properly, you rob your team from the opportunity to learn. This opens up the possibility of repeating the same mistakes. You also miss out on an opportunity to grow as a company.

Postmortems restore confidence

Right from the beginning, we decided we wanted to treat our customers the same way we wanted to be treated. Generally speaking, enterprise companies (Github, Google Cloud, Amazon, et cetera) have more engaged and invested technical audiences who want to know the details of what’s going on. Amazon, for example, offers some. We wanted to offer something similar. A note to facilitators: Building self-determination skills, such as goal-setting, decision-making, self-advocacy, and problem-solving should be included in career planning for all youth. Youth with disabilities and/or other (perceived) barriers to employment and/or disconnected youth will tend to have a resiliency not always experienced by their same-aged peers — and not always easily seen or understood by themselves or by adults. You are encouraged to use the activities in this section to help young people explore. Everyone experiences problems from time to time. Some of our problems are big and complicated, while others may be more easily solved. There is no shortage of challenges and issues that can arise on the job.

Whether in an office or on a construction site, experiencing difficulties with the tasks at hand or with co-

workers, the workplace presents ongoing challenges on a daily basis. Whether these problems are large or

small, they need to be dealt with constructively and fairly. Having the necessary skills to identify solutions to

problems is one of the skills that employers look for in employees.

Technical Post-mortem

While it has certainly not been the most practical, the reasoning for it was as follows:

After some deliberation, we distilled the trust problem into the following principles:

• The gut: The first impression. The feeling of seeing someone for just a split second and forming a preliminary opinion about it. Incredibly strong and usually a good heuristic developed over generations of human interaction.
• The brain: Analytical mode, where we try to rationalize our opinion, find objective measures of why we should trust a person. We usually return here when we get doubts.

Any good frontend design would have to account for these two aspects of trust-building instincts. We derived them specifically to counter the concept of an in-transparent score. We disliked the idea of being told to trust someone, we just didn’t believe that this is how trust online works.