Leading Incidents

Leading Incidents is a video course in calm, confident, cool-as-hell incident response, designed for people who build and operate software.

In a series of engaging lessons, you’ll learn how to

  • rally an organized response to a software incident;

  • keep a response team focused and cohesive under pressure; and together,

  • get to the bottom of even the most perplexing outage.

Leading Incidents is split into three parts:

The course

You’re an engineer. The skills you use day-to-day are, by and large, engineering skills. Coding, testing code, diagnosing faults; that sort of thing. Sometimes you do “architecture design,” whatever that is. And this is all hunky dory, until one day, your manager tells you, “We’re starting an on-call rotation.” Uh oh.

As soon as you’re on call, you need to be prepared to raise and lead a team at a moment’s notice, often under extreme pressure. Incident response calls for an entirely different skill set than your day-to-day job.

Leading Incidents will teach you the skill of incident response. Your guide will be Dan Slimmon, a Site Reliability Engineer with over 17 years of experience at scale. During his career, which has included a stint leading Etsy’s observability team and several years as a Staff SRE at HashiCorp, Dan has led hundreds of incidents and trained dozens of engineers in incident response techniques. There’s no one better to learn incident response from.

1: Assemble

How to conjure a team out of thin air:

  • Taking on the incident lead persona

  • Declaring an incident

  • Assigning roles and delegating

2: Coordinate

How to keep that team’s head on its shoulders:

  • Steering the response effort

  • Closed-loop communication

  • Unambiguous handovers

3: Diagnose

How to rationally investigate problems, even under pressure:

  • Thinking in hypotheses

  • Converging on a plausible explanation

  • Evolving the plan

Purchase Options

There are 2 ways to buy Leading Incidents. Prices are listed in USD on a per-student basis.

The Individual

$125

USD/student

Includes perpetual access to:

  • 2.5+ hours of engaging video lessons

  • Written lecture notes for easy reference and study

  • Resources for further learning

  • Tweak-and-use incident response checklists and cheat sheets

  • and more!

The Cohort

$995

USD/student

The Cohort package is for teams that want not only to master incident response themselves, but to level up incident response practices at their company.

Sign up a cohort of 4 to 8 students to go through Learning Incidents together, one part per week. Students will

  • Be invited to an exclusive weekly 60-minute office hours session with the instructor

  • Complete a guided self-assessment to evaluate their current incident response readiness

  • Get access to Building Incident Response, our complete guide to establishing an effective and durable incident response practice in your company.

Please reach D2E by email if you’re interested in the Cohort package.