To whoever did an on-call

Excerpt: A first letter, as to why we're building this, and what this blog will be.

Dear whoever is on call tonight,

Your phone goes off. It's 3 in the morning, and for a few seconds you don't know where you are. Then you do. You find the laptop, squint at a dashboard, and start the oldest job in software: working out what is actually wrong, while everyone who could help is asleep.

We named the company after that hour, because that's who we're building for.

Here's what I've come to believe about it. The hard part is rarely the fix. The hard part is knowing, really knowing, that you've found the cause. An alert tells you something looks wrong. A dashboard tells you what changed around the same time. Neither tells you why. So a tired, capable person makes their best guess, and then has to decide whether to touch production on the strength of it.

If you work at a bank, you do this on systems nobody is allowed to rewrite. One wrong change can reach people's money, and the data isn't allowed to leave the building. Most of what's sold for this moment wasn't built for you.

3AM is our attempt at something better. It runs inside your own network. It tests its theory against your live systems before it suggests anything. It rehearses the fix, waits for a person to say yes, and then checks again that the fix worked.

That's the company. This blog is something else.

This is where we'll write about what running production really teaches you: the incidents, the fixes, and the things that looked obvious and turned out to be wrong. That includes our own mistakes, because an engineering blog with only victories in it isn't telling you the truth. We'll write when we have something worth your time, and not before.

We're early, and we have a lot left to prove. I'd rather say that in the first letter than have you find it out later.

If this sounds useful, subscribe, and the next letter will reach your inbox at a more sensible hour. And if you have a 3 a.m. story of your own, the one you still think about, I'd really like to hear it. You can find me on LinkedIn.

Until then, I hope your phone stays quiet.