What Can Developers Learn from Being On Call?

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We often talk about being on call as being a bad thing. For example, the night before I wrote this my phone woke me up in the middle of the night because something went wrong on a computer. That’s no fun! I was grumpy.

In this post, though, we’re going to talk about what you can learn from being on call and how it can make you a better software engineer!. And to learn from being on call you don’t necessarily need to get woken up in the middle of the night. By “being on call”, here, I mean “being responsible for your code when it breaks”. It could mean waking up to issues that happened overnight and needing to fix them during your workday!

Everything in here is synthesized from an amazing Twitter thread by Charity Majors where she asked “How has being on call made you a better engineer?”: https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy/status/847508734188191745

Read more at Julia Evans Blog