Jenny Bramble

Empathetic Engineering Leader and Quality Advocate

Jenny ended up in engineering leadership after coming up through support and devops, cutting her teeth on that interesting role that acts as the ‘translator’ between customer requests from support and the development team. Her love of support and the human side of problems lets her find a sweet spot between empathy for the user and empathy for her team. She’s done testing, support, or human interfacing for most of her career. She finds herself happiest when she’s making an impact on other people - whether it’s helping find issues in applications, leading scrum, speaking at events, or just grabbing coffee and chatting.

Talk:
Detective Hat: Investigating Production Issues

Level: Advanced

It was a dark and stormy night, and our production system was out cold. It was our job to find out what had gone wrong and set it right. But how? Our developer instincts weren’t helping. Our tester’s-intuition saw risk everywhere. We needed a third way; the hard-nosed, boots-on-the-ground, skeptical mindset of the detective!

We will give you a powerful mental model for tracking down production issues in your codebase and a set of tools to help you along the way. Using noir and tv detective stories as a backdrop, you’ll learn how to take ownership of production behaviour, confront hard truths, bring your tools to bear, and follow through to make production better for everyone.

With the detective mindset, grit, and determination you can go beyond sleuthing out your systems’ behaviours. You’ll build better paths to observability and better processes to prevent and recover production incidents.

You might even help your colleagues find detective hats of their own.

OBJECTIVES: Production issues are a game you can win. The truth is out there. You can find it.

  • Holding the right mindset
  • Gathering the facts
  • Modelling the incident
  • Not repeating mistakes

AUDIENCE:

  • Developers who push code to productions