LFI Conf 23 | Bridget Lane, Stripe | Stripe's Recipe: Ingredients for a Heart-Healthy On-Call

Bridget Lane, Senior Software Developer, Stripe

Institutional knowledge. Ever present and slow to share, we've all encountered at least one incident where someone deep in the company "just had to know" about a specific piece of a system to put out a fire. This is the worst place to be — siloed and reliant on heroism to resolve incidents — and yet, it seems we all find ourselves here inevitably. But what if we told you it didn't have to be this way? With the appropriate time and investment, you could level-up your engineers faster, break down your knowledge silos, and lower your cholesterol.

In this talk, we will share the things we've implemented on Stripe's API Platform team to make two pillars of our on-call experience as positive as possible: onboarding onto the rotation, and the engineering experience once on the rotation. We will discuss things like "energy efficient" gamedays, utilizing incident reports for learning, and our approach to shadow on-call rotations. A heart-healthy on-call means reducing engineer burnout, increasing the ability to trust and rely on your coworkers, and quickly mitigating incidents in a blameless way. Join us for a deep-dive into Stripe's approach to continuously improving on-call.

Learning from Incidents (LFI) is a community challenging conventional views and reshaping how the software industry thinks about incidents, software reliability, and the critical role people play in keeping their systems running.In today’s economy, software organizations can’t afford to not learn from incidents.

LFI Conference is made possible by the financial and planning support of the Jeli team. Nora Jones, Founder and CEO of Jeli, founded the LFI community and website as a way to show organizations how to get more ROI out of their most powerful investments -- their incidents.