11 karma · joined March 1, 2014
Blaming the developers (or any specific individual/group for that matter) is a cop out, it’s easy and lazy and doesn’t get to the root of the problem, which is more often than not a lack of processes, tools, information and lack of time/desire from leadership to address “technical debt” (for lack of a better term), no matter how many times the devs bring that up.
When you blame an individual or a group you can close the case shut on the post mortem and not get to any substantive improvements, meaning this can and will happen again, just to somebody else.
That’s why blameless postmortem and a blameless culture is so important. This is a good article about that philosophy:
> My summary of blameless culture is: when there is an outage, incident, or escaped bug in your service, assume the individuals involved had the best of intentions, and either they did not have the correct information to make a better decision, or the tools allowed them to make a mistake.
There’s also a way of organizing tasks on a Kanban. It looks a lot like Trello.
Try to list all the things I need to do across all my tasks and areas of responsibility, and check them throughout the day. If I didn't get around to something I copy it the following day to the next list. Simple stuff.