Learn one thing at a time

I’m determined to make a tradition of this, which is why I find myself in an empty office on New Years Eve trying to remember what’s gone by these last twelve months. I ended “Looking back at 2023” saying “brace for impact” which I had thought meant I was prepared for this year, but in retrospect I wasn’t even close. It’s a common story in...

It was the week before pandemic lockdowns began. Like many companies, we were thinking about what a fully remote workforce might mean for us. In an attempt to get ahead of things, we scheduled a ‘Game Day’ to test our work-from-home incident response capabilities. You know, just in case we’d need to abandon the office (spoiler: we would). The...

Last year I wrote “Looking back at 2022” and found it valuable to reflect and celebrate a year of work, even if just as a reminder of the things that happened before going into the next. So with another year having passed, time to try again! This time for my second full year working at incident.io. To contextualise the year, some milestones (see...

Recently, I’ve needed to add concurrency protections to several HTTP APIs. One endpoint was for updating a schedule, where incident.io customers would tell us about who was on-call and what hours they worked so we could generate a pay report. It would suck if another user was modifying the same schedule – maybe just to add a single user – and...

Most people are familiar with state machines and know their value. The average state machine library can help you model states, prevent invalid transitions, and produce diagrams that help even non-technical people understand how the code behaves. This article isn’t about making the case for state machines. It’s about how you take the concept of a...