| At a previous employer, we had an incident management bot that was pretty widely used by product teams but for whatever reason, the actual data just sat in a Redis instance (the default Hubot adaptor out of the box) and was never looked at The data was mostly a mess as the bot had interfaced with Flowdock at one point and later Slack, but even then Slack had undergone a few changes to the message schema. All up, there were about 4 different distinct schemas. To be clear, what was stored was the representation of an incident that also included data about the person who commanded the incident. Generally the commander data was just a copy of their profile data, and that was the thing that mostly changed over time. Anyway, one of my first tasks when I joined was to throw together a small web API to expose that data so we could generate reports and what not. Perhaps the most important thing to note is that nothing I did actually drove any particular change. I just got lucky because when our new CTO joined and started asking product teams how many incidents they often had, product teams started asking our group for reports. Seeing how much time my manager was spending generating these things, I took the next logical step of throwing together a basic UI (filtering, sorting, exporting to CSV) so that it inverted the overhead onto the teams themselves rather than it being bottlenecked by one or two people doing reports. Anyway, there's more to it than that, and funnily enough no one in our wider team was really aware of what I put together. Having said that, it was a fun experience and kinda nice getting a little bit of attention for a while. It was more or less a side project so I got to field customer requests (and treat users like customers), balance priorities and so on I guess the theme here would be a mix of visibility and automating toil? --- I've often thought about doing a New Old Thing style postmortem on that bot. It was rewritten a little while ago now but the first version, using the default hubot adaptor, made me really appreciate Redis. It was doing some highly uestionable stuff under the hood but as a testament to Redis, it never missed a beat. |