October 2023 Summaries

The decision between building or buying an incident management solution is crucial for companies as it impacts various aspects such as roadmaps, productivity, team structure, and customer satisfaction. Cost is a significant factor to consider when making this choice. When building your own solution, you need to account for the development team's time and salaries, including engineers, designers, and product managers. Additionally, there are costs associated with hosting infrastructure, security and data processing expertise, and ongoing maintenance and upgrades. Companies must weigh these factors against the potential benefits of building their own solution versus purchasing one from a third-party provider.

The Debrief is a new podcast series from incident.io featuring insightful conversations with engineers, product managers, co-founders, and more about the topic of incident management. In this inaugural episode, Alicia Collymore, Engineering Manager at incident.io, shares practical advice for first time engineering managers. Key points include: 1. Delegating responsibilities to multiply and grow people is crucial for effective management. 2. Building genuine relationships with reports helps create a consistent and supportive environment. 3. Understanding one's strengths as an engineering manager allows for better alignment with company expectations and personal growth.

Pattern Parties are a method used by incident.io to maintain consistency in their codebase and keep design patterns up-to-date. During these events, the engineering team dedicates time to implementing a set of related design patterns across the entire codebase. The process involves choosing a theme for each party, selecting impactful patterns within that theme, documenting agreed patterns, and providing guidance on migration. By the end of the Pattern Party, engineers are familiar with the new patterns and can apply them in their work. This approach helps improve shipping speed, smoother onboarding for new joiners, quicker debugging, and better collaboration among teams.