66. I am no longer postmortem free.
Get the juicy details on my personal fuckups
Introduction
Another meta article about a software engineer career. Today, I will give a perspective on postmortems.
I admit, my guilty pleasure when I do some small error at work is opening the internal postmortem page (called OMG, lol) to check some ongoing postmortems and make myself feel better :D.
Even better, I now can just look at my personal postmortem.
Yeah.. you read that right! After almost 3 years, I am no longer post mortem free!
Let’s see how to structure a good postmortem (but hoping that you never have to write one!).
"Let’s plan for a future where we’re all as stupid as we are today."
– Dan Milstein
Blameless postmortem culture leads to less outages (AND more risk taking!)
Blameless postmortems are all about creating a culture where we focus on what happened rather than who did it.
The idea is simple: if engineers aren’t afraid of being blamed for outages, they are more likely to take risks, innovate, and flag problems early, ultimately leading to fewer outages in the long run.
This openness encourages honest conversations, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to learn from mistakes.
When you remove fear from the equation, you increase transparency and a willingness to take necessary risks.
This culture is alive and strong at Google and I LOVE IT!
