DevOpsDays Halifax

On-call doesn’t need to suck; ways to help make your on-call better
2024-08-22 , Scotiabank Lecture Hall

Being on-call can be really hard at times. Incidents happen and when they do, it can cause alert fatigue, long hours, lots of stress and not getting your day job done. Speaker to share experiences about working for a company where on-call needed to evolve to make it more humane.


Being on-call can be really hard at times. Incidents happen and when they do, it can cause alert fatigue, long hours, lots of stress and not getting your day job done. In this talk, Ken will discuss his experience working for a company that grew rapidly over several years and where on-call needed to evolve to make it more humane.

As part of this talk, Ken will discuss strategies such as:
- Being an advocate for better quality software, so that it prevents outages and unnecessary alarms
- Dealing with the emotional component of the firefighting related stress when incidents happen
- How to help change your organization so that it makes on-call part of the culture.

Attendees will take away:
- Way of making your on-call rotation more humane
- Identifying ways of evolving how your on-call rotation can work effectively in order to prevent incidents from happening
- Ideas around making your alerting and monitoring better to prevent burnout and to increase your visibility.

Ken De Souza has been in software development for over 20 years. He is a software developer, currently specializing in building tools and culture related to helping developers securely deploy and monitor the code they create, with a passion for delivering high quality software at a rapid pace.

He has spoken at software development conferences over the last 10 years. He currently resides in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.