Failure is Always an Option

Failure is still one of the most undervalued things in our business, in most businesses really. We still tend to point fingers elsewhere, blame the other department, or try anything to cover our asses.

Coffee and the Art of Customer Happiness

This essay is an extended version of a talk I gave at Paperless Post about coffee and customer happiness. While the talk was originally titled “Coffee and the Art of Software Maintenance”, I figured that customer happiness is overall a much more fitting for the topic.

The Virtues of Monitoring, Redux

Two years ago, I wrote about the virtues of monitoring. A lot has changed, a lot has improved, and I’ve certainly learned a lot since I wrote that initial overview on monitoring as a whole.

On Pager Duty

Over the last year, as we started turning Travis CI into a hosted product, we added a ton of metrics and monitoring. While we started out slow, we soon figured out which metrics are key and which are necessary to monitor the overall behavior of the system.

A Plea for Client Library Instrumentation

The need to measure everything that moves in a distributed system or even simple web apps is becoming the basis for thorough monitoring of an application.