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.

Part 2 of 3 launches Wednesday, July 10.

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 16 years of experience at scale. During his career, including as the lead of Etsy’s observability team and later as a Staff SRE at HashiCorp, Dan has run 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

Launch Schedule

Your purchase at any time gives you access to all Leading Incidents content released in the past or future. The launch schedule is as follows:

  • Wednesday 12 June 2024: Part 1: Assemble.

  • Wednesday 10 July 2024: Part 2: Coordinate; checklists and cheat sheets.

  • Wednesday 7 August 2024: Part 3: Diagnose; and even more bonus content!

The best way to stay in the loop on the launch of Leading Incidents is to join the D2E mailing list.

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:

  • 3+ 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!

Please check the launch schedule above for rolling release dates.

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 Part 4: Evolve – the secret 4th part of Leading Incidents, which teaches how to establish an incident response protocol at your company

  • get access to a wealth of templates and articles to help set the course of your company’s incident response journey

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