To put it bluntly, did someone die? In engineering, let’s hope your answer is a resounding no. So why do we continue to use the word ‘postmortem’?

Incidents are inevitable, and the reality is some of them are inevitably going to repeat themselves. FireHydrant has always strived to make the entire incident response lifecycle smooth, but up until today, common incident types were slightly burdensome for our customers. We decided it was time to help people make it easy to declare incidents using easy-to-use templates, which we’re deeming Incident types.

There’s no better time than now to dedicate effort to reliable software. If it wasn’t apparent before, this past year has made it more evident than ever: People expect their software tools to work every time, all the time. The shift in the way end-users think about software was as inevitable as our daily applications entered our lives, almost like water and electricity entered our homes.

2020 was, needless to say, not the best. Looking on the brighter side, in December, FireHydrant turned 2, and in spite of it all, we grew quite a bit. We raised our $8M Series A in May, our team grew nearly 4x in size, added some amazing features such as making FireHydrant Runbooks even more powerful with conditions, and great integrations, which you can find here. But even better, we got to work with all of you!

This is the first in a series of interviews with experts about reliability, incident response, and related topics. Jeff Smith has been in the technology industry for over 20 years, oscillating between management and individual contributor. Jeff currently serves as the Director of Production Operations for Centro, an advertising software company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Previously he served as the Manager of Site Reliability Engineering at Grubhub.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 Virtual (say that five times fast) was held online, November 18th to 20th. It was the second virtual KubeCon, due to the Coronavirus pandemic. I had a lot of fun attending and saw a lot of great talks. If you weren’t able to participate in real-time, the CNCF will post the talks soon to its YouTube channel.

CI/CD is a software development strategy which allows for faster development by introducing automation while still maintaining the quality of code deployed to production. Implementing a CI/CD pipeline not only promotes a safer deployment process but also improves the incident response process. CI/CD is broken down into multiple parts. The CI refers to continuous integration, meanwhile, the CD can refer to continuous delivery and/or continuous deployment.

HashiConf Digital October 2020 was the second HashiConf to be held online due to the coronavirus pandemic. It was held on October 14 and 15 on HashiCorp’s digital event platform. As of this writing, recordings of the talks are available on the platform, but they will be posted soon to HashiCorp’s YouTube channel.