The first few minutes of an incident are often the hardest. Tension and adrenaline levels are high, and if you don’t have a well-documented incident management plan in place, mistakes are inevitable. It was actually the years I spent managing incidents without the right tools in those high-tension moments that inspired me to build FireHydrant. I built the tool I wished I’d had when I was trying to move fast at the start of incidents.

It’s been a busy month at FireHydrant. We’ve had our heads down shipping loads of improvements across the platform, and I want to take you on a quick tour of the changes. At the core of all these updates is a common theme: things are now a heck of a lot more intuitive. There’s a lot to digest here; read the full roundup of June releases below or follow us on Twitter for a bite-size demo each day this week.

I recently published a couple of blog posts about what happens when you invest in a thoughtful incident management strategy and three first steps to take to do so. What I’m getting at in these posts is that we need a shift toward proactivity in the software operators community. I’d wager most of the world is responding to incidents as they happen, and nothing more.

There are a number of lessons I learned guiding weeks-long backcountry leadership courses for teens that I carried with me into my roles in incident management. In this blog post, I’ll share three that stand out.

Too many of us are still playing whack-a-mole when it comes to incidents: an incident is declared, the on-call engineer is paged, the incident is resolved and then forgotten — until next time. It’s time to start thinking in terms of proactive incident management, not just reactive incident response.