December 2023 Summaries

In 2023, incident.io experienced significant growth and expansion. The company doubled in size across its London and U.S. locations, opened an office in New York, attended numerous conferences, released impactful products like Status Pages and Catalog, published a weekly changelog, and hosted a large offsite event in Barcelona. These achievements reflect the company's commitment to democratizing incident management for all departments and its ongoing efforts to improve the product experience for customers. As they look forward to 2024, incident.io remains focused on making it the single place people go when things go wrong.

Setting up a successful on-call function requires careful planning and consideration of both business needs and team well-being. Key factors include having enough people on rotation, encouraging overrides for personal responsibilities, avoiding alert fatigue by being selective with paging alerts, and fostering an environment where it's okay to admit not knowing the answer. Automating low-level tasks can also help support on-call responders. By addressing these aspects, organizations can create a robust on-call function that protects their business while supporting the well-being of their team members.

Incident.io developers use MacBooks for their development work. When Apple released the M3 MacBook Pros in October, a debate arose about whether upgrading existing developer machines from M1/M2 chips to M3 would be beneficial. To determine this, the team collected build telemetry data from developer laptops and analyzed it using OpenAI's latest models. They concluded that the M3 is an incremental improvement on M2, but not enough to justify a significant price increase over the base M3 Pro model. Therefore, they decided to upgrade their M1 laptops to the base M3 Pro with 36GB of memory and wait for the M2s as they are performing well already.

The author discusses their experience using Slack's block kit for product design and interaction with incident.io. They express their desire for additional features such as inline images in section and rich text blocks, accessories in rich text blocks, different attachment colors in light and dark modes, attachments as standard blocks, customizable input blocks, and broader support for date formatting. These enhancements would improve the user experience and overall functionality of Slack's block kit framework.

In 2023, incident.io experienced significant growth and success with the launch of new products such as Catalog and Status Pages. The company expanded its workforce to nearly 80 employees and opened a private office in the U.S. Additionally, they made notable appearances at conferences like KubeCon and LeadDev alongside industry giants Google and IBM. Co-founders Chris, Stephen, and Pete reflect on their experiences during this transformative year, discussing challenges, wins, growth, future plans, and what they appreciate most about each other.

Incident.io, a platform for streamlining incident response, is now available for purchase through AWS Marketplace. This makes it easier for organizations using Amazon Web Services to onboard and manage the software without dealing with multiple vendors or procurement processes. Purchasing through AWS Marketplace simplifies billing and contributes to an Enterprise Discount Program (EDP), enhancing trust and security as the platform meets high-quality benchmarks set by AWS.

In this episode, Jack, a Data Analyst at incident.io, discusses why data teams should consider using incident management tools like incident.io to manage pipeline issues. He highlights the growing trend of data teams adopting practices from software engineering and emphasizes the need for better processes in handling incidents. Jack shares his experience with incident.io, explaining how it has improved communication, collaboration, and visibility during incident response. Using an incident management tool can bring consistency, control, and efficiency to managing issues for data teams.

The text discusses how the author's team at incident.io made one of their code-generation scripts 97% faster by reducing the number of missing imports in the generated code, thereby making goimports' job much easier. This change significantly improved the development workflow and saved around 3 engineer-hours per week. The author emphasizes that investing in the development workflow always pays off.

At incident.io, we aim to simplify incident handling by enhancing communication in incident summaries and updates. We recently adopted rich text input for our Slack UI, which allows users to emphasize certain information, create lists, or mention people easily. However, supporting rich text across multiple systems with varying levels of support is complex. To maintain a consistent experience, we decided to restrict lists in the dashboard to one level deep and transform rich text into compatible formats for other systems like Jira, Confluence, Notion, Google Docs, and email. Despite the complexity, this change has improved readability and ease of writing incident summaries and updates.

The article discusses the process behind creating a user-friendly interface for Configurable Forms, which allows users to control the layout and content of their incident forms in one place. The team had two main goals: introducing more configuration options and making it easy for users to understand how changes will affect the form's appearance during editing. They started by focusing on problem 1 and built a UI that enabled access to various configuration options. After receiving feedback from beta users, they turned their attention to problem 2, aiming to create an interface where users could easily visualize the impact of their changes. The team went through several iterations, including adding interactivity to the preview, inlining the preview with the form, and refining the design based on feedback from polish parties. The final product features a Slack modal-style preview that helps users understand what they're adding or removing without needing field names.

The Product Responder role at incident.io is a rotating position that focuses on shipping features, fixing bugs, and handling incidents quickly to improve customer satisfaction. This role helps streamline customer interactions and allows other engineering teams to focus on their projects without being distracted by urgent issues. The Product Responder team operates on a weekly planning cycle, with responsibilities including setting goals for the upcoming week, deciding who will be the Product Responder, and addressing tickets from customers or other teams. This role is distinct from an on-call role, as it involves handling a broader range of reactive work rather than just responding to alerts during incidents. The benefits of being a Product Responder include faster issue resolution, positive customer relationships, and efficient communication within the team.