[seeingnature]

I'd love to see the rest of your postmortem template! I never thought about adding a "Where did we get lucky?" question.

I recently realized that one question for me should be, "Did you panic? What was the result of that panic? What caused the panic?"

I had taken down a network, and the device led me down a pathway that required multiple apps and multiple log ins I didn't have to regain access. I panicked and because the network was small, roamed and moved all devices to my backup network.

The following day, under no stress, I realized that my mistake was that I was scanning a QR code 90 degrees off from it's proper orientation. I didn't realize that QR codes had a proper orientation and figured that their corner identifiers handled any orientation. Then it was simple to gain access to that device. I couldn't even replicate the other odd path.

[somat]

One of my favorite man pages is scan_ffs https://man.openbsd.org/scan_ffs

    The basic operation of this program is as follows:

    1. Panic. You usually do so anyways, so you might as well get it over with. Just don't do anything stupid. Panic away from your machine. Then relax, and see if the steps below won't help you out.

    2. ...

[srejk]

The standard SRE one recommended by Google has a lucky section. We tend to use it to talk about getting unlucky too.

[nathan_douglas]

A good section to have is one on concept/process issues you encountered, which I think is a generalization of your question about panic.

For instance, you might be mistaken about the operation of a system in some way that prolongs an outage or complicates recovery. Or perhaps there are complicated commands that someone pasted in a comment in a Slack channel once upon a time and you have to engage in gymnastics with Sloogle™ to find them, while the PM and PO are requesting updates. Or you end up saving the day because of a random confluence of rabbit holes you'd traversed that week, but you couldn't expect anyone else on the team to have had the same flash of insight that you did.

That might be information that is valuable to document or add to training materials before it is forgotten. A lot of postmortems focus on the root cause, which is great and necessary, but don't look closely at the process of trying to stop the bleeding.

[parliament32]

No, QR codes are auto-orienting[1]. If you're getting a different reading at different orientations, there is a bug in your scanner.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code#Design

[egypturnash]

It does seem to be possible to design QR codes that scan differently depending on the orientation, though they look a little visibly malformed.

https://hackaday.com/2025/01/23/this-qr-code-leads-to-two-we...

[Suppafly]

> I didn't realize that QR codes had a proper orientation and figured that their corner identifiers handled any orientation.

Same, I assumed they were designed to always work. I suspect it was whatever app or library you were using that wasn't designed to handle them correctly.