Latest issue
The Incident You Survived Isn't the One That Will Break You
5/3/2026
The postmortem is done. The action items are filed. Someone updated the runbook. You closed the ticket, and the on-call rotation moved on. Three months later, a different system fails in a way that rhymes with the last one — same class of problem, different component, different t…
Recent posts
Three hundred alerts in a week. Forty of them actionable. The other two hundred and sixty? Your team learned to ignore those months ago — they just haven't gotten around to deletin…
Most teams treat oncall as a staffing problem. Someone has to be paged; someone has to respond. The rotation exists to distribute that burden. Fair enough. But if that's the whole…
You're twenty minutes into an incident. The alerts are firing, the on-call channel is filling up, and someone pastes a link to the runbook. You follow step three. Nothing changes.…
There's a particular kind of dread that hits when you're mid-incident, you've pulled up the runbook, and the first step references a service that was deprecated eight months ago. T…
It's 2:47am. The alert fires. You find the runbook, follow it step by step, and the system gets worse. Somewhere between the last incident and this one, the architecture changed —…
There's a version of this newsletter that opens with a crisp thesis, three supporting data points, and a clean close. That version would be dishonest right now. Because the most op…
There's a particular kind of meeting that wastes everyone's time: the one where the agenda says "general update" and nobody has prepared anything specific. The room fills with stat…
There's a particular kind of organizational dysfunction that doesn't show up in dashboards. No metric flags it. No post-mortem names it. It's the slow drift between what a team kno…