Chapter 16: Shipping and running

An alert needs someone to answer it.

On-call

Also called Pager, Rotation

The rota that decides who answers when something breaks, at any hour. That person has to respond quickly, and needs the access and the knowledge to act.

An agent can write the code and it can't be accountable at 3am. Whoever is on call has to understand what shipped, and a codebase nobody has read is a bad thing to be woken up by.

Say it to your agent

“Write the on-call note for this change: what it touches, how we would know it is broken, the exact command to turn it off, and what you aren't sure about. Assume the reader was just woken up, has never seen this code and can't ask you.”

The workshop

Name a word, or describe what you mean in everyday language.