In this issue we cover:

• Common incident handling practices across the industry. What are the trends on how tech companies approach incidents today?
• Incident review best practices. What are processes, tools and approaches that we can point to as sensible practices?
• Incident review practices of tomorrow. A few teams and companies have moved beyond what we’d call the best practices of today. What is their approach and how is it working?
• What tech can learn from incident handling in other industries. Incidents are not unique to tech; fields like healthcare, the military and many others have a long history of efficiently dealing with incidents. What can we learn from them?
• Incident review/postmortem examples and templates.

SQLAlchemy is confusing. There’s a lot of “magic” that happens under the hood. There’s a spider web system of sessions, connections, engines, and models. Should I autocommit? What’s the difference between flushing and committing? How do I create the database in the first place?

A few days ago, I bit the bullet and sledged through the SQLAlchemy docs. I ran some experiments and did a lot of googling, and finally wrapped my head around SQLAlchemy (I think). In this article, I document my understanding of SQLAlchemy; mostly for my future self when I inevitably forget how it works.

I've had the opportunity lately to speak to a lot of DevOps engineers at startups around Europe. Some come from a more traditional infrastructure background, beginning their careers in network administration or system administration. Most are coming from either frontend or backend teams, choosing to focus more on the infrastructure work (which hey, that's great, different perspectives are always appreciated).

However, a pretty alarming trend has emerged through these conversations. They seem to start with the existing sys admin or devops person leaving and suddenly they are dropped into the role with almost no experience or training. Left to their own devices with root access to the AWS account, they often have no idea what to even start. Learning on the job is one thing, but being responsible for the critical functioning of an entire companies infrastructure with no time to ramp up is crazy and frankly terrifying.

Andrew Clay Shafer walks through the progression of ‘Infrastructure as Code' in theory and practice, some problems these developments solved and also some problems they revealed.

Writing ability might be a baseline requirement for many software development jobs, but it’s not a skill that developers typically think about improving for their careers. While it’s tempting to invest all your spare time learning new frameworks and languages, improving your writing might actually be a better way to advance your career and stand out in tech.

For this piece, I spoke to eight software developers to learn more about how writing has helped them advance their careers. I then distilled their stories into five specific benefits that writing has given them throughout their careers and added a bit of my own experience as well.