DevOps Days Podcast

Developers are trained to communicate to things with a goal in mind. When you're talking to something like, say a computer, you type in your code and it responds by giving you back what you want. Nine times out of ten, it works perfectly. Why, then, is it so difficult to do this same thing when talking to a client about a project, updating a superior on your progress, or pitching an investor your million-dollar idea? Because talking to people requires a special set of skills - namely, empathy and a little bit of storytelling. In an industry filled with brilliant minds, great ideas and mass disruption, so few of the best and brightest know how to tell their compelling story. The takeaways from this workshop will be learning how to value the listener and use vulnerability to improve your social connection.

It's 2:30 AM and you hear your phone buzz. You reach over and see an alert from PagerDuty. That new service your team has been working on for a few weeks has crashed and you don't know the first thing about debugging Clojure apps. After crawling out of bed and logging into your company's VPN you discover your co-workers have left you absolutely no documentation on what to do when "bad things happen". You sit there wondering if you'll be getting back to bed tonight.

Sound familiar? It doesn't have to be this way. On-call doesn't have to be a pit of lost productivity and stress. On-call can actually be a very rewarding experience that improves application stability, increases uptime, and avoids those dreaded 2:30 AM PagerDuty notifications. Let's start thinking about on-call for Humans.