Detective Hat: Investigating Production Issues -Adrian Dunston& Jenny Bramble|Code BEAM America 2025

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Detective Hat: Investigating Production Issues -Adrian Dunston& Jenny Bramble|Code BEAM America 2025

Detective Hat: Investigating Production Issues -Adrian Dunston& Jenny Bramble|Code BEAM America 2025

This talk was recorded at Code BEAM America in March 2025. If you’re curious about our upcoming event, check https://codebebeameurope.com

It was a dark and stormy night, and our production system was out cold. It was our job to find out what had gone wrong and set it right. But how? Our developer instincts weren’t helping. Our tester’s-intuition saw risk everywhere. We needed a third way; the hard-nosed, boots-on-the-ground, skeptical mindset of the detective!

We will give you a powerful mental model for tracking down production issues in your codebase and a set of tools to help you along the way. Using noir and tv detective stories as a backdrop, you’ll learn how to take ownership of production behaviour, confront hard truths, bring your tools to bear, and follow through to make production better for everyone.

With the detective mindset, grit, and determination you can go beyond sleuthing out your systems’ behaviours. You’ll build better paths to observability and better processes to prevent and recover production incidents.

You might even help your colleagues find detective hats of their own.

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