Garden-path incidents
It’s 12 noon on a Minneapolis Wednesday, which means Barb can be found at Quang. As the waiter sets down Barb’s usual order (#307, the Bun Chay, extra spicy), Barb’s nostrils catch the heavenly aroma of peanuts and scallions and red chiles. A wave of calm moves through her. Barb pulls her chair forward, cracks apart her wooden chopsticks, and…her pager goes off.
Barb grabs one quick bite of spring roll as she flags down the waiter for a to-go box. Opening Slack on her phone, she declares an incident, joins the Zoom call, and hurries back up Nicollet Ave. and around the corner, toward her apartment.
Five minutes later, finally sitting at her laptop, Barb is pretty sure she knows what the problem is. The error flooding the logs is:
That looks like a straightforward app bug to her, and wouldn’t you know it? Right before these errors started cropping up, there was a deploy to the Rails app by a newish dev named Alice, who according to her Slack profile, is based in Seattle. Barb asks this ‘Alice’ to join the incident Zoom.
