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October 16, 2006

I'm Carrying a Pager...

...for the first time since c. 1999, and I'm really not sure how I feel about that.

By design, we don't have an operations team as such - so the development team rotates responsibility for the live system. This is my first turn in the rotation since joining the team about 5 months ago. That's not to say that the rotation list is 5 months long - there was a grace period in there, but when I was asked this morning if I could focus on some stability work this week, taking the pager seemed to come with the territory.

My initial reaction is decidedly mixed. My previous pager carrying experiences have all been as a sysadmin - where I was generally cleaning up after Other People(TM) broke things. This time, the only other people are the rest of the team - a bunch of smart guys who all like to sleep at night - so we're pretty focused on making sure the systems we build don't need much care and feeding.

I'm also convinced, after seeing how pathologically broken the relationship between "development," "qa," and "operations" was at my last gig, that forcing developers to at least share in operational responsibilities is the only rational course. It's self correcting -- i.e. developers who write crappy code are always cleaning up after themselves -- and it eliminates work -- i.e. there are no "operations manuals" - as the people operating the system have intimate knowledge of it.

So, my stint lasts for a week ('till next Monday). I'll let you know how it ends up working out...

Posted by dberger at October 16, 2006 6:16 PM