LFI Conf 23 | Charity Majors, Founder & CTO, Honeycomb.io | Keynote: Debugging Is A Team Sport

Have you ever noticed that the best debugger on a team is usually the person who’s been there the longest? This is not some kind of immutable law of engineering, it’s the direct consequence of specific choices people commonly make...and you can make different ones. What we call “debugging” is often just pattern matching on past experiences, which means you get good at debugging by experiencing similar incidents over and over and over. But what if you stop getting a ton of repeat outages? What if, whenever you get paged, it’s almost always something new? Time to systems; how to methodically interrogate your systems, putting one foot after the other by asking question after question, which is how you follow the results to the answer. Every time. Teams that are consistently good at debugging weren’t born that way; they got good by 1) using good tools, and 2) learning to leverage and piggyback off each other’s expertise.

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.