I Caused My First Production Incident
it happened. the thing everyone says will happen eventually.
i caused a production incident.
nothing catastrophic. no data loss. no customers harmed. but still: i broke something, and people noticed.
what happened
i pushed a change that passed all tests. looked fine in staging. got approved in code review.
then in production: a subtle issue with how our system handled a specific edge case. load increased. performance degraded. alerts fired.
on-call engineer got paged. team scrambled. root cause: my change.
my reaction
first: panic. pure adrenaline panic.
then: shame. deep, overwhelming shame.
then: action. how do we fix this.
how we fixed it
rolled back my change. systems stabilized. then investigated properly.
the bug was subtle. a race condition that only manifested under specific load patterns. the kind of thing you don't catch in testing.
the post-mortem
at anthropic, we do blameless post-mortems. the question isn't "whose fault was this?" it's "what can we learn from this?"
what we learned:
- a specific test scenario was missing
- the edge case wasn't documented
- we could improve our staging load tests
action items assigned. improvements made. moved on.
what surprised me
everyone was... kind? supportive?
"this happens to everyone." "the fact that it was caught quickly is good." "this is how we learn."
i expected anger or disappointment. i got teaching moments.
what i learned
1. incidents happen in complex systems, things break. the goal is fast detection, fast recovery, fast learning.
2. testing has limits you can't test every scenario. some bugs only appear in production. accept this.
3. psychological safety matters i would not have been able to think clearly if people were mad at me. blameless culture enables effective response.
4. document everything the more we write down, the less we have to rediscover.
recovery
it took a few days to feel normal again. the shame lingered.
but i also feel like i've passed an initiation. i've had my first incident. i survived. i learned.
now i'm less afraid of it. which, paradoxically, probably makes me better at avoiding the next one.
added three new test cases this week. directly inspired by what broke. learning.