When we look back on this rollercoaster of a year that was 2020, we’ve all faced some of the most unforgettable, challenging, and transformative experiences of our lives—and many of them are going to shape how we plan for the future. For businesses that had to discover new ways to keep operating, they’re revisiting derailed 2020 plans for the new year with detailed strategies to handle the unexpected.

Customer experience, or CX, is essentially the overall impression customers form of your business during their various interactions in the buyer’s journey. It plays a deciding role in their likelihood of not just an immediate purchase but in their decision to remain loyal to your company and recommend you to others. For today’s tech-savvy customers, the experience that they get while doing business with your brand is just as important as the quality of your products, if not more.

January 4th, 2021, the communication service Slack suffered a major outage. Teams working remotely found their primary communication method unavailable. The incident lasted over 4 hours, during which some customers had intermittent or delayed service, and others had no service at all. It was a reminder that even the most established tools are susceptible to downtime. This is a core lesson of SRE: that failure is inevitable.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. In this edition, we’ll learn about the changing face of work in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccine roll out.

Our Makefile entry point for developing against the Mattermost Server already tries to simplify things for developers as much as possible. For example, when invoking make run-server, this build tooling takes care of all of the following (among other things!).