The VOID

Watch on YouTube In Part II of the Multi-Party Dilemma (MPD) drill retrospective, we reconvene to dig deeper into the implications and nuances of the simulated incident exercise hosted on the Uptime Labs platform. Eric Dobbs (incident analyst), Alex Elman (deputy IC), and Sarah Butt (incident commander) continue their debrief with Courtney, reflecting on how team behavior evolved under stress, the...

Watch on YouTube In this episode I'm joined by a group of seasoned incident response professionals to discuss a simulated incident drill conducted on the Uptime Labs platform. The conversation centers around the Multi-party Dilemma —the challenge of coordinating incident response across teams or organizations with different missions, contexts, or incentives. Eric Dobbs, our incident analyst,...

Greetings fellow incident nerds, and welcome to Season 2 of The VOID podcast. The main new thing for this new season is we’re now available in video—so if you’re listening to this and prefer watching me make odd faces and nod a lot, you can find us here on YouTube .  The other new thing is we now have sponsors! These folks help make this podcast possible, but they don’t have any say over who joins...

On this episode of the VOID podcast, I’m joined by Nick Travaglini, who is a Technical Customer Success Manager at Honeycomb. Nick wrote up a near miss that his team tackled towards the end of 2023, and I’ve been really wanting to discuss a near miss incident report for a very long time. What’s a Near Miss you might ask, or how is that an incident, or is it? What IS an incident? Keep listening, be...

We took a bit of a hiatus from recording last year, but we're back with an episode that I think everyone is really going to enjoy. Late last year, John Allspaw told me about this new company called Uptime Labs. They simulate software incidents, giving people a safe and constructive environment in which to experience incidents, practice what response is like, and bring what they learn back to...

In the second episode of the VOID podcast, Courtney Wang, an SRE at Reddit, said that he was inspired to start writing more in-depth narrative incident reports after reading the write-up of the Slack January 4th, 2021 outage . That incident report, along with many other excellent ones, was penned by Laura Nolan and I've been trying to get her on this podcast since I started it. So, this is a...

What happens when you use your own incident management software to manage your own incidents but said incident takes out your own incident management product? Tune in to find out... We chat with engineer Lawrence Jones about: How their product is designed, and how that both contributed to, but also helped them quickly resolve, the incident The role that organizational scaling (hiring lots of folks...

In this episode we take a delightful detour from our usual VOID programming to have Emily Ruppe, a Solutions Engineer at Jeli.io and member of the Learning From Incidents (LFI) community, on the program to discuss the upcoming LFI Conference happening in Denver in February. Find out more about the goals and some of the featured speakers for the event, and we hope to see you there! Discussed in thi...

If you or anyone you know  has listened to Spotify, you're likely familiar with their year end Wrapped tradition. You get a viral, shareable little summary of your favorite songs, albums and artists from the year. In this episode, I chat with Clint Byrum, an engineer whose team helps keep Spotify for Artists running, which in turn keeps well, Spotify running.  Each year, the team looks back a...

At the end of January, 2021, a group of Reddit users organized what's called a "short squeeze." They  intended to wreak havoc on hedge funds that were shorting the stock of a struggling brick and mortar game retailer called GameStop. They were coordinating to buy more stock in the company and drive its price further up. In large part, they were successful—at least for a little while...

"We no longer felt confident about what the exact operational boundaries of our cluster were supposed to be." In early 2021, observability company Honeycomb dealt with a series of outages related to their Kafka architectural migration, culminating in a 12-hour incident, which is an extremely long outage for the company. In this episode, we chat with two engineers involved in these incide...