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GeeCON 2017: Zach Holman - Perfecting Mistakes

geecon conference

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  • Recommended by 1 person: 1 in engineering communities.
  • Presented by Zach Holman

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

341 views9 years ago1 recommendation

Tools and practiceCareers and interviewsCode review and teamworkDeveloper productivitySRE and incidents

Zach Holman discusses major technical and operational mistakes made by tech companies and how teams can effectively address and learn from them.

You’re going to mess up. Probably really terribly. The site’s going to crash. Or get hacked. Or you’re going to accidentally drop the database. Or enable email delivery on staging servers. Something bad is going to happen, eventually, whether you messed up or not. This talk is a talk about mistakes made by companies like GitHub, GitLab, and others, and how you and your team can address them when they pop up.

Why it's here

1 person recommends this

What people say. Recommended for its insights into how early-stage startups like GitHub handled major database and configuration mistakes.

u/xtreakin r/programming • Recommends

On “Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Coding Site GitHub”

To be fair GitHub also made mistakes in early days. Chris, CEO ran test suite against production DB and dropped production data. They fixed the issue but they still didn't fix the config or something that made them lose it again when they pushed the fix. This was in 2010s when they were relatively young and small. There were also similar incidents by DigitalOcean, Travis CI, amazon etc. I agree it was a mistake by GitLab but their transparent handling of the issue alleviated the magnitude of damage. Talk by Zach Holman : link to this video
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