What I Wish I Knew before Going On-call

Tuesday, March 26, 2019 - 2:00 pm3:30 pm

Chie Shu, Dorothy Jung, and Wenting Wang, Yelp

Abstract: 

Firefighting a broken system is time-sensitive and stressful but becomes even more challenging as teams and systems evolve. As an on-call engineer, scaling processes among humans is an important problem to solve. How do we ramp up new engineers effectively? How can we bring existing on-call engineers up to speed? In this workshop we'll share common myths among new on-call engineers and the Do's and Don'ts of on-call onboarding, as well as run through hands-on activities you can take back to work and apply directly to your own on-call processes.

Chie Shu, Yelp

Chie Shu is a backend Software Engineer at Yelp. She has worked on improving Yelp's revenue-critical Ads data pipeline to be more resilient to system failures, and designed heuristics used internally by executives and Product Managers to assess the financial impact of on-call incidents. Chie holds a bachelor's degree in Computational Biology from Cornell University.

Dorothy Jung, Yelp

Dorothy Jung is a Software Engineer with multiple years of on-call experience. At Yelp she served as a "pushmaster", managing and monitoring company-wide deployments to production; and as a release engineering deputy, helping to set up CI/CD pipelines within the Ads organization. She was previously at DreamWorks Animation R&D, where she worked on upgrading the studio's build management tools. Dorothy holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and French from the University of California, Berkeley.

Wenting Wang, Yelp

Wenting Wang is a Software Engineer with three years of industry experience. She has been on-call for different teams at Yelp: on the BizApp backend team, where she worked closely with mobile developers and monitored mobile user traffic; and on the Ads team, where she currently develops and maintains revenue-critical real-time processing systems. Wenting received her master's degree in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and was previously a doctoral candidate in Computer Science focusing on distributed systems at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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BibTeX
@conference {229595,
author = {Chie Shu and Dorothy Jung and Wenting Wang},
title = {What I Wish I Knew before Going On-call},
year = {2019},
address = {Brooklyn, NY},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}

Presentation Video