Engineering notes

Backlogs are liquid. Reliability isn't.

Notes from running services in production: error budgets, on-call, technical debt and the backlog that quietly grows while everyone ships features.

Latest posts
SREPlanning

Putting error budgets into the backlog, not next to it

Why reliability work keeps losing prioritisation fights, and the one change to sprint planning that fixed it for us.

Tech debt

Technical debt has an interest rate. Measure it.

A lightweight way to turn "we should refactor this" into a number product managers can actually compare.

On-callToil

Keep a toil ledger for your on-call rotation

Every page that didn't need a human is a backlog item in disguise. Here is the spreadsheet we use to catch them.