Since the advent of ChatGPT, companies have been racing to build AI features into their product. Previously, if you wanted AI features you needed to hire a team of specialists to build machine learning models in-house. But now that OpenAI’s models are an API call away, the investment required to build shiny AI has never been lower. We were one of those companies. Here’s our journey to building our first AI feature, and some practical advice if you’ll be doing the same.

One of the most painful parts of incident management is keeping on top of the many things that happen when you’re right in the middle of an incident. From figuring out and communicating what’s happening, to ensuring you learn from previous incidents, and even capturing the right actions – incidents are hard, but they don’t need to be this hard.

As we’ve talked about before, our app is a monolith: all our backend code lives together and gets compiled into a single binary. One of the reasons I prefer monolithic architectures is that they make it much easier to focus on shipping features without having to spend much time thinking about where code should live and how to get all the data you need together quickly. However, I’m not going to claim there aren’t disadvantages too. One of those is compile times.

2023 at incident.io was a year to remember. While it's easy to be cyclical about proclaiming that every year was better than the last, a few things stand out that made 2023 truly a year for the books. TL;DR, a lot happened! Especially when you consider that a lot of things didn't make the list above. So as we turn the page to 2024, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the transformative year that was 2023, not only for us but our customers as well.

Whenever you're providing a service to businesses or individuals that they rely on, it's important to make sure that it's up and running as much as possible without disruptions. But the reality is that, despite your best efforts, downtime does happen. Regardless of when incidents strike, whether it’s 2 PM in the middle of the working day or 2 AM, it's important to have people available to diagnose and resolve issues as soon as possible.

All incident.io developers are given a MacBook which they use for their development work. That meant when Apple released the M3 MacBook Pros in October, people naturally started asking questions like “wow, how much more productive might I be if my laptop looked that good?” and “perhaps we’d be more secure if our machines were Space Black 🤔” Pete’s (our CTO) response to this was “if you can prove it’s worthwhile, we’ll do it”

What a year 2023 was at incident.io! While it's hard to summarize 365 days into just a few sentences, a handful of moments stood out from this transformative year: So as we close the curtain on a momentous 2023, we sat down with the three co-founders of incident.io—Chris, Stephen, and Pete—to do a bit of reflection on the wild ride that was this year.

When declaring and responding to an incident with incident.io, most of your interactions with our product will go via Slack. You might configure your forms in our web dashboard, but the responder using them to declare an incident is most likely doing so from a Slack modal, and the incident announcement will be posted as a Slack message. This means a lot of our product design falls within the constraints of what we can build using Slack’s block kit.