What being on call taught me about empathy

Another sample article. Swap it for a real story, the personal ones are the ones people remember.

The first time my phone went off at 2:47am, I thought the hard part would be finding the bug. It wasn't. The hard part was remembering that somewhere, a real person couldn't do the thing they needed to do, and that the engineer who wrote the bug was probably asleep, and probably me.

Write for the tired version of yourself

Runbooks, error messages, dashboards, I now write all of them for someone who is half-awake, slightly scared and in a hurry. That person deserves clarity more than cleverness.

Blameless doesn't mean pointless

A good post-mortem doesn't ask who. It asks how did the system make this mistake easy?, and then makes it hard.