Incidents Are Feedback, Not Failures

No one wants to be paged at 2 AM. No one enjoys the Microsoft Teams thread with “@here something’s down.” But over time, I’ve come to see incidents not as personal failures—but as high-signal feedback.

Every alert, outage, and edge case that leaks into prod is a message from your system. It's not judging you. It's telling you something you didn’t know. And if you listen carefully, it’ll teach you more than most sprint retros.

Here’s how I’ve reframed incidents—and what it’s changed about how I work.

Failure Is Inevitable. Ignoring It Is Optional.

Early in my career, I feared incidents. I thought they meant I messed up. I’d scan logs nervously, try to fix things fast, and hope nobody noticed the PR that caused it.

Now? I expect incidents. Not because I’m careless—but because no system, no matter how well-designed, can anticipate every real-world interaction.

The only real failure is not learning from them.

Every Incident Tells a Story

I treat every incident like a post-mortem, not a blame game. And I always ask:

• What wasn't visible before this happened?
• What assumption broke?
• What shortcut finally reached its limit?
• What user behavior did we underestimate?

These are gold. They reveal the gaps between how we thought the system worked and how it actually works in production.

My Incident Workflow

I keep it simple:

1. Triage fast — contain impact, communicate early
2. Log everything — timestamps, decisions, attempted fixes
3. Document root cause clearly — not just the symptom
4. Automate where it makes sense — alert thresholds, rate limits, failovers
5. Make one structural improvement — even if it’s small

The goal isn’t perfection. It’s progress.

Patterns I Watch For

After a few years, you start noticing patterns:

• Incidents often happen right after non-technical changes (policy shifts, roles, config toggles)
• The biggest issues rarely come from code—they come from unclear expectations
• Monitoring is useless if you don’t act on what it shows
• Silent failures are the scariest ones—build alerts for what doesn’t happen

Blame-Free Culture Isn’t Just a Buzzword

If your team punishes mistakes, people hide them.

The best engineering cultures I’ve worked in treated incidents as shared puzzles, not personal faults. That’s how you get faster learning, better tools, and more resilient systems.

When someone says “I broke prod,” my first instinct is to ask:

“What did we miss together?”

Incidents Drive Real Improvement

Here are a few things I’ve built that were directly inspired by production incidents:

• A PyQt Gantt view to trace incomplete timesheets
• Role auditing tools after a mistaken permission escalation
• A safe JSON editor for workflow transitions with cycle detection
• Metrics dashboards after getting burned by invisible performance regressions

All of these came not from roadmaps—but from problems that broke something.

Final Thoughts

Incidents are the system teaching you in real-time.
They’re loud, messy, uncomfortable—but they’re also honest.

You can ignore them, patch over them, or blame someone.
Or you can treat them as the feedback loop they are.

And once you do, you’ll not only build stronger systems—
You’ll become a stronger engineer.

Have you had an incident that changed how you build? I’d love to hear what it taught you. Hit me up or share your war story—I’ll trade you one of mine.