Project Triage: What to do When Everything Hits the Fan

Excellent and well-designed. Great practical advice.

My favorite 3 elements:

- Culture of "it's okay to break things, important and okay to tell people about it." - low blame.
- Triage plans, esp. communications - e.g. who to tell what when; what conditions to shut off Prod. Record the console commands. if-then's.
- Checklists full of yesterday's mistakes to not make again.

Very good broad application - language/platform agnostic, but still technical.

Not worth demoting by a star, (I would do 4.5 stars if it was available) but a drawback for me was when it took a while for the poo to actually start hitting this fan in the examples in the talk. The first portion seemed to be more about "how to plan well", "how to avoid having poo hit the fan in the first place" -- which is fine, but missed the emotional hook. The first 10-15 minutes I toyed with hopping talks to Services Architechture; whereas by 50 minutes in I was quite glad I had stayed, after you had gotten to the real "poo hitting the fan" portion. The 5 why's and client-politics stuff, fitting for when there's a "slower problem" was valuable, but perhaps wasn't well-represented by the intensity of the title/subtitle.

This is an important talk, well delivered, and the projector-screen tech failure at the outset was indeed fitting. :-)

Some gems but overall seemed rather vague and non-cohesive.

This talk was well delivered in a very approachable tone with humor well-placed. Eryn has a great confident delivery, and her story-telling skills are fantastic. A suggestions for the talk would be to have a few more stories about events and dissecting what happened and then what should have happened. The advice within the "real" life stories are what really hooked me in for this talk (versus the slides where advice was more listed) and are what are really sticking with me after the talk. All in all, thoroughly entertaining and educational (edutaining?), and I am working on a much more structured incident plan as a result. Thank you!

Nice work. I though that the talk was a nice overview on ideas of how to deal with really bad stuff in an organized way. We definitely have a couple of takeaways, and will be working to implement them soon.

Some really great points about things that we often overlook in our haste to finish and get the job done. I especially liked her recommendation not to immediately act and fix a major issue, but to make it known so that the proper actions can be executed.

Engaging talk about the human element of software development. After a weekend of technical talks, this was a great reminder that (to paraphrase) we are humans making software for humans, and to err is human. Recognize that mistakes are going to happen, and plan for them.

Loved the talk, engaging, funny, and entertaining. It wasn't really a talk that you would walk away from with an epiphany and that's ok. Hearing others stories of dealing with disasters is alway a good reminder that we are all in the same boat.

The real world examples made it easy to relate her ideas to things that I encounter where I work. While I did get a few take-aways, I was hoping a bit for a few more concrete ideas for certain situations. But I know that no 2 projects are the same ... so that's not worth dropping my rating a star.

I love Eryn as a speaker. She's full of energy, and she has a way of injecting humor into things without taking it too far.

This talk tied with another as my favorite of the conference. I thought some of the advice was very practical and often gets forgotten in a moment of panic. I thought this particularly of the obvious advice, to calm down, relax, breathe and think about next steps and making a plan before just reacting. All excellent! I liked the real world examples, even if the names were changed to protect the guilty. If anything, I would have liked to have heard more about those.

Full of valuable tools and techniques for taking the right steps after things go wrong.