Brent Chapman
When something breaks in production, nobody calls 911; you and your team are the emergency responders. The fire service has spent more than a century learning how to organize people under pressure, and much of the tech industry has quietly adapted those lessons, often without realizing where they came from. But the fire department only covers half the job. Fire marshals cover everything outside the fire itself: preventing fires before they start, and investigating them afterward to figure out what really happened and what should change.
In this talk, we'll look at what DevOps and SRE teams can learn from both the fire department and the fire marshal: how the Incident Command System translates to managing technical incidents, and how the investigative mindset of the fire marshal can transform your incident reviews from blame-and-forget rituals into the most valuable learning your organization does. Expect practical lessons, a few war stories, and some surprising parallels between fighting fires and keeping services running.
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Whether you're new to on-call or you've been running incidents for years, you'll leave with practical insights about responding to incidents, preventing them, and learning more from the ones that happen anyway, despite your best efforts.
