On-call handoff notes that people actually read
We used to write long handoff documents that nobody read. Now we write three lines and people actually use them.
The template:
- What's on fire (or nothing)
- What I changed that you should know about
- What I'm worried about
That's it. Three lines, posted in the on-call channel at handoff.
The surprising part: the third line is the most valuable. "I'm worried about the cron job that runs at 3am" has saved us several times.
We also added a rule: if you had a quiet week, say so explicitly. Silence is ambiguous; "nothing happened" is information.
Side quest: reading SQLite internals. WAL mode is a great case study in making a simple thing predictable.
原文：https://www.a8q9.cn/en/article/on-call-handoff-notes-that-people-actually-read-ec73b6.html