Learning from incidents has become something of a hot topic within the software industry, and for good reason. Analyzing mistakes and mishaps can help organizations avoid similar issues in the future, leading to improved operations and increased safety. But too often we treat learning from incidents as the end goal, rather than a means to achieving greater business success. The goal is not for our organisations to learn from incidents: it’s for them to be better, more successful businesses.

How often have you heard the phrase “trust is earned” in life? While well-meaning, I think this can actually lead to some strange behaviour at work, especially when you’re on a fast growing team. Startups experience a lot of chaos and unknowns your teams need to navigate, so it’s vital to know you can trust the people around you. As you grow, how you set expectations around trust as people join your team can impact your ability to hire, onboard, ship and ultimately, survive.

We have to come clean. During KubeCon, we experienced an incident that we weren’t ready to discuss until now. This incident caused quite a disruption and, had it been left unresolved, would have had a massive snowball effect. At the time, we didn’t want to raise any alarms, so we kept it quiet while our team rallied to resolve it. And to be honest, most folks probably didn’t even realize that it happened since we moved so quickly.

April was a month to remember at incident.io. Not only did we attend our second conference ever with KubeCon in Amsterdam, but we also very subtly released our brand-new Status Pages product. OK, it probably wasn't subtle. Both moments required months of preparation, feedback loops, iteration, and so much more behind-the-scenes work to get right. So if you ran into us at KubeCon, thank you for stopping by and meeting with our team.