TLDR: The Best Engineering Lessons Happen During Outages
Date: 2024-05-29 Source: https://arpitbhayani.me/blogs/read-rca-docs
Overview
Level up your engineering skills by learning from production outages & real-world system failures. YouTube playlist included! I get excited whenever there is a production outage, because I know I will be learning something new and interesting very soon.
Key Points
- I get excited whenever there is a production outage, because I know I will be learning something new and interesting very soon.
- I always hop on the call, even when I am not on call :)
- Being part of stressful situations and seeing how seniors fixed the issues and operated with a calm head made me a better engineer.
- Reading old postmortem documents (RCAs) of outages at all my workplaces became a habit.
- If you are an engineer early in your career, do not shy away from being on-call and spend some time reading RCAs.
- They are filled with interesting, practical, real-world insights about the systems, coding blunders, tuning parameters, etc.