Jack Li explains how his production engineering team rolled out a new incident review process, how they’ve made the case for investing in reliability, and specific tools his team has built to improve reliability.
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Discussion points:
- (1:25) How Jack became interested in reliability
- (3:24) Where the Instagram Reels team fits into the broader organization
- (4:05) What Jack’s team focuses on
- (4:55) The role of production engineering at Instagram versus Shopify
- (8:32) The essence of DevOps
- (10:44) Pros and cons of having product-focused teams
- (13:35) How Jack’s team defines and tracks quality
- (15:46) Signals the team monitors outside of systems
- (18:10) Revamping Instagram Reel’s incident management process
- (19:46) Making the case for improving the incident review process
- (28:10) How their incident review process works
- (31:55) The roles involved in an incident review
- (33:40) The value of having incident reviews
- (35:55) Why leaders should be part of incident reviews
- (38:34) Why Jack’s team builds tools for driving reliability goals
- (40:06) The types of tools Jack’s team focuses on
- (43:09) What a merge queue is and why it was built at Shopify
- (51:20) Using a Slack bot for ‘failed build’ alerts
- (52:32) When a company should consider implementing a merge queue
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Creators & Guests
Host
Abi Noda
Abi is the founder and CEO of DX (getdx.com), which helps engineering leaders measure and improve developer experience. Abi formerly founded Pull Panda, which was acquired by GitHub.
What is Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda?
This is a weekly podcast focused on developer productivity and the teams and leaders dedicated to improving it. Topics include in-depth interviews with Platform and DevEx teams, as well as the latest research and approaches on measuring developer productivity. The EE podcast is hosted by Abi Noda, the founder and CEO of DX (getdx.com) and published researcher focused on developing measurement methods to help organizations improve developer experience and productivity.