Fast build times are great, which is why we aim for less than 5m between merging a PR and getting it into production. Not only is waiting on builds a waste of developer time — and an annoying concentration breaker — the speed at which you can deploy new changes has an impact on your shipping velocity. Put simply, you can ship faster and with more confidence when deploying a follow-up fix is a simple, quick change.

Incidents are a great opportunity to gather both context and skill. They take people out of their day-to-day roles, and force ephemeral teams to solve unexpected and challenging problems. In my career, I've found incidents can be a great accelerator - for both myself and others around me. It was after leading my first incident at GoCardless that I started to feel really comfortable in the codebase and the team.

We're a small team of engineers right now, but each engineer has experience working at companies who invested heavily in observability. While we can't afford months of time dedicated to our tooling, we want to come as close as possible to what we know is good, while running as little as we can- ideally buying, not building. Even with these constraints, we've been surprised at just how good we've managed to get our setup.

At incident.io, we ship fast. We're talking multiple times a day, every day (yes, including Fridays). Once I merge a pull request (PR), my changes rocket their way into production without me lifting a finger. 💅 It's when we tackle larger projects that this becomes a bit more complicated. We recently launched Announcement Rules, which let you configure which channels incident announcements are posted in depending on criteria you define.

When you’re deep into an incident and there’s alerts firing, decisions to be made, and people to escalate to, it’s easy for outward communication with your customers to fall off the priority list. In many regards this makes sense; it seems natural to put all of your focus and energy into minimising the impact and getting things back on track as soon as possible.

Last week, we spent some time talking to Gergely Orosz about our thoughts on what happens when an incident is over, and you're looking back on how things went. If you haven't read it already, grab a coffee, get comfortable, and read Gergely's full post Postmortem Best Practices here. But before you do that, here's some bonus material on some of our points.