What's the Right Balance?

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Dan Sogon-Retta: A lot of the work that we do, what we have done recently is in the area of what we call release safety. And I think historically, you know, Meta previously, Facebook had a mantra of move fast, break things. And so a lot of our work on our team is sort of like figuring out what the right balance is.

Jack Li explains how his production engineering team rolled out a new incident review process, how they’ve made the case for investing in reliability, and specific tools his team has built to improve reliability.

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Discussion points:

(1:25) How Jack became interested in reliability
(3:24) Where the Instagram Reels team fits into the broader organization
(4:05) What Jack’s team focuses on
(4:55) The role of production engineering at Instagram versus Shopify
(8:32) The essence of DevOps
(10:44) Pros and cons of having product-focused teams
(13:35) How Jack’s team defines and tracks quality
(15:46) Signals the team monitors outside of systems
(18:10) Revamping Instagram Reel’s incident management process
(19:46) Making the case for improving the incident review process
(28:10) How their incident review process works
(31:55) The roles involved in an incident review
(33:40) The value of having incident reviews
(35:55) Why leaders should be part of incident reviews
(38:34) Why Jack’s team builds tools for driving reliability goals
(40:06) The types of tools Jack’s team focuses on
(43:09) What a merge queue is and why it was built at Shopify
(51:20) Using a Slack bot for ‘failed build’ alerts
(52:32) When a company should consider implementing a merge queue

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Mentions and links:
Follow Jack on LinkedIn
Jack’s article from his time on Shopify about their Merge Queue
Jack’s talk on Shopify’s Merge Queue at GitHub Universe 2019