Klee Thomas

Senior Software Developer, nib

Leading change

Picking up the pieces – post-incident reviews

The world of software is like a basketball balanced on a Jenga game. It’s fine while it’s fine, but all it takes is a misplaced semicolon, a bad database failover or some unlucky road worker cutting a cable and the whole world comes crashing down. Fortunately, when the pieces are on the floor we pull together and get it balanced again. But then what? Examining what went wrong and identifying contributing factors helps us prevent and preempt issues from re-arising.

This talk examines strategies for Post-Incident Reviews. Starting with commonplace practices, Klee shows how leveraging modern monitoring practices alongside ChatOps can identify contributing factors, not just a single cause. These contributing factors give rise to actionable outcomes that prevent the same thing reoccuring and feedback into the incident lifecycle: helping the team detect, respond to, remediate and analyse the next incident.

About Klee Thomas

Klee Thomas is a software developer based in Newcastle. He has spent the last three years working for nib health funds as a senior software developer. There he has been focused on delivering good quality software as part of the team devoted to supporting nib’s existing customer base. Through his career in software development, he has become enamoured with the art and craft of developing software and loves to talk about Agile practices, clean code and test driven development.

Klee is a passionate member of the Newcastle software development and digital creators community, where he regularly attends and speaks at meetups. For the last seven years, he’s been actively involved with and organising the Newcastle Coders Group, Newcastle’s longest running software development focused meetup, which has been meeting consistently since 2005.

Outside of software development he enjoys Martial Arts, most recently Okinawan Goju Ryu Karate, and spending time with his wife and cats while trying to find something funny to watch on Netflix.