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Comment by 58x14 | Hacker News Reader

Just my personal take, I think this is a really well-written incident postmortem. It's specific, extensive, candid, and dare I say, entertaining?

Many incident reports are fully lacking in any meaningful detail, or wholly unapologetic. I actually enjoyed learning tidbits about the author, in particular their mention of https://how.complexsystems.fail/.

Reading this boosted my confidence in Slack's teams, which should ultimately be the objective of a release like this. It's not pure PR nor a gruff legally-obligated disclosure.

It helps that I wasn't really affected by this incident.

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The named authors on the blog post are an amazing set of engineers and the type that would have added a lot of introspection and expertise to what happened while maintaining a high-level of lightheartedness. I spent a number of years at Slack and was involved in a postmortem in my first week as an Engineering Manager. I was impressed by how excellent practices were borrowed from Etsy in the early days and then magnified by Google's practices. As someone who once had to run these sessions and distill the learnings in to the wee hours of the morning this is great to hear.

The fact that the current top comment thread is quibbling about the date format in the title seems to agree with this assessment, if there was anything real to complain about that’s what we’d be seeing, instead we get bikeshedding on the date format in the title of a post.

[adds "bikeshedding" to vocabulary.]

This is awesome because we had a bikeshedding image floating around Slack's Slack instance that was posted with enough frequency that I remember it.

Today is your lucky day!

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Well that commenter's username is 'diarrhea' so...

Which is aligned with US date formatting.

which only makes it confusing for the rest of the world

It's not that confusing if you know there are only 12 months. If it happened to occur on 2-4-22, then it would be pretty confusing.

its particularly bad because US dates are written with slashes. please leave dashes for ISO so we have some hope of understanding anything.

Just because you don’t seem to like it does not mean the US date format is invalid. It should be followed while in the US.

Or you could use a sane, unambiguous date format regardless of where you are in the world like 22 Feb 2022.

This is devolving into tribalism.

On today’s internet, a frank post mortem delivers value to customers and PR gold too.

Laura Nolan is a gem that Slack is lucky to have.

I think a well written post-mortem is an excellent recruiting tool.

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