Halt and Don’t Catch Fire
summary
Argues that new small ops teams can’t erase legacy debt but can slow its creation by identifying five stages of grief for technical debt, building a visible backlog/dashboard, running small iterations, and enforcing simple processes like regular biweekly syncs. Gives a concrete failure: a three‑node cluster loses two replicas during a rolling schema migration and the team migrated to Percona 5.6 to restore service — the fix works but is brittle. Recommends automating repetitive tasks, training juniors, and stopping heroics.
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chapters (5)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:08Going down the rabbit hole
- 5:36Technical Depth
- 7:30Ask the Right Questions
- 9:39Repetitive Tasks
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