Postmortem · Debug Season · Pulse Beat
When he came back, he wrote the thing he had been putting off. A postmortem is a document that engineers write after a failure, and the good ones are quietly merciless. He wrote his in plain language…
When he came back, he wrote the thing he had been putting off.
A postmortem is a document that engineers write after a failure, and the good ones are quietly merciless. He wrote his in plain language and published it on the Pagewise website, with no login, under the heading What went wrong, in detail. It was four pages. It said what the bug was, line by line. It said why he had not caught it: I trusted code I had not read, and I tidied a database without asking what depended on it. It listed the nineteen pages, without names. It listed the three things he had changed so it could not happen again: tests, checks, a rule that no code from outside was ever used without being read.
He ended it with a paragraph he had not planned. I started Pagewise because I believed people deserve a place to write that nobody is watching. I still believe it. This season taught me that believing it is not enough: you have to keep checking.
He posted it on a Wednesday night. By Friday it had been read eleven thousand times, mostly by strangers, and three companies had written to ask if they could use it in training.