MINI MINI-COURSE
When It Breaks — Incident Response & Debugging Under Fire
What a senior engineer actually does at 3am when production is down — the mitigate-first mindset, debugging under pressure, and a live mock incident.
Who this is for
- Working developers, QA engineers, and team leads who own or will own production systems
- Anyone who could get paged when something breaks and wants a rehearsed strategy instead of panic
- Engineers shipping AI-generated code who realize they'll one day have to debug it under fire
What you'll cover
- ✓The mitigate-first mindset — why seniors stop the bleeding before hunting the root cause
- ✓The incident lifecycle: detect → acknowledge → assess → mitigate → communicate → diagnose → recover → post-mortem
- ✓Fast mitigation moves: rollbacks, feature flags, failover, scaling, restarts
- ✓Debugging under pressure — reading logs, metrics, and traces; directing AI to explain unfamiliar code
- ✓Communicating during an incident — honest status updates that buy trust and time
- ✓The blameless post-mortem — turning the outage into durable knowledge and updated runbooks
- ✓A live mock incident — run the full loop end to end on a system that breaks on purpose
What you'll leave with
A rehearsed incident-response playbook, a post-mortem template, and the calm of having already run the loop once — plus a personal runbook you can adapt to your own systems.
Format & schedule
Weekend workshop — 2 × 2.5h live sessions
Hands-on with a live mock incident
Post-mortem template included
What to bring: A laptop; basic comfort reading logs and using a terminal helps.
Where this leads
Loved this mini-course? Go deeper:
AI-Assisted Development (flagship)
Build, audit, and own production systems end to end — including the resilience, observability, and incident-response discipline this workshop introduces, applied across two full projects.
See the course →