Jack Li explains how his production engineering team rolled out a new incident review process, how they’ve made the case for investing in reliability, and specific tools his team has built to improve reliability.
—
Discussion points:
- (1:25) How Jack became interested in reliability
- (3:24) Where the Instagram Reels team fits into the broader organization
- (4:05) What Jack’s team focuses on
- (4:55) The role of production engineering at Instagram versus Shopify
- (8:32) The essence of DevOps
- (10:44) Pros and cons of having product-focused teams
- (13:35) How Jack’s team defines and tracks quality
- (15:46) Signals the team monitors outside of systems
- (18:10) Revamping Instagram Reel’s incident management process
- (19:46) Making the case for improving the incident review process
- (28:10) How their incident review process works
- (31:55) The roles involved in an incident review
- (33:40) The value of having incident reviews
- (35:55) Why leaders should be part of incident reviews
- (38:34) Why Jack’s team builds tools for driving reliability goals
- (40:06) The types of tools Jack’s team focuses on
- (43:09) What a merge queue is and why it was built at Shopify
- (51:20) Using a Slack bot for ‘failed build’ alerts
- (52:32) When a company should consider implementing a merge queue
—
Mentions and links:
Follow Jack on LinkedIn
Jack’s article from his time on Shopify about their Merge Queue
Jack’s talk on Shopify’s Merge Queue at GitHub Universe 2019