What are some of the foundational graphs that I look for in a quick glance dashboard? This is the dashboard that EVERY engineering manager and on call engineer should be able to pull up when there is an alert to get a 50,000 ft view of their service. Service Metrics Key APIs…

I often get questions about how to define an incident severity matrix. There are multiple dimensions that can be used to define the severity of an incident. The most popular dimensions are - Customer Impact — How many customers are impacted by an incident > SEV1 when no customer can…

Post Incident Reviews (PIR) are a great way to mechanise “diving deep” in any organisation. Why we write PIRs? Organisations like AWS and Atlassian often publish Post Incident Reviews -https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/ https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/post-incident-review-april-2022-outage These organisations leverage an incident review process to - - Avoid multi-hour or multi-day outages. - Learn about scaling cliffs and share learnings. - And…

When considering promotions or career advancements (e.g. taking on a bigger role), I consider a few dimensions to evaluate for readiness (growth or promotion). What’s important to note is that EVERY promotion and growth case is unique. People are unique. What that means is people leaders must apply judgement in…

Writing Many companies, including Amazon and Atlassian, leverage narratives as a mechanism to encourage leaders to write down their ideas, review it with peers, rewrite it when necessary, and dive deep into ambiguous areas before presenting the idea to the intended audience. …

Building for resiliency is the key to scaling your systems and infrastructure. Complex systems fail; that’s the inevitable truth. It was around 6:45 PM when the oncall engineer started investigating an anomaly with a service that supported tens of millions of requests per second. The oncall engineer noticed that at…

Back in 2015 at AWS, I took over a product that was riddled with technical debt. We managed between 70–100 high severity event on a good week. The system did not have basic protocols like rate limiting on the APIs, prioritisation of work, or defensive capabilities such as isolating noisy…

Who is this for? If you are looking for guidance on how to setup a process to interview full stack or backend engineers you may find this article helpful. Let’s get started … I’ve generally found four one-hour interviews to be sufficient to get a 360 view of a candidate. …