Who to blame for all your problems Conducting Blameless Postmortems This post is based off of my talk at PyCascades 2019 To start off with, what is a postmortem? There are two common uses of the term: A document detailing what happened during an incident A meeting to review an incident, usually resulting in the creation of the postmortem document This post is focused on the meeting, but I'll also have some recommendations for the document. Why Run Postmortems? Why do we conduct postmortems, anyway? Production broke, we fixed it, call it a day, right? Holding postmortems helps us understand better how our systems work -- and how they don't. If your system is complex (and it probably is), the people who work on it have an incomplete and inaccurate view of how it works. Incidents highlight where these gaps and inaccuracies lie. Reviewing incidents after the fact will improve your understanding of your systems. By doing this as a group and sharing what you found, you...
I decided to relearn JavaScript after not having worked with it since school so I'm going through the JavaScript track at exercism.io . Yesterday, I ran into behavior I didn't expect with Array.prototype.every() , and after getting help from some actual JS developers, they were surprised too. The Exercism project I was working on was to create a class to check if a sentence is a pangram. (A pangram is a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet.) My approach was simple: create a sparse array with 26 elements (one for each letter) walk the sentence, and for each letter, look up its index in the alphabet, then set that index in my array to true . After I was done walking the sentence, I then used Array.prototype.every() to check the results. Array.prototype.every() seemed perfect for this: it takes a callback function, and applies it to every element of an array. If it gets back a falsy return value from one an element, it stops processing and returns false. If it...