Writing a Post-Mortem

TechCrunch pointed to a blog post by GitHub detailed a recent network related outage. As someone who all to often gets neck deep resolving network issues I find it interesting to read these outage post-mortems which, to their credit, many online services post following outages. All to often once a major issue is resolved it is tempting to just breath a sigh of relief and go on. But taking the time to reflect and write about what happened can help the learning process to ensure that the same issue doesn’t happen again, or at least lead to quicker resolution if it does.

Even if its only in your own personal log or journal, a post-mortem write-up is a good practice to develop.