We’ve been retiring cloud dev environments in favour of laptop based development at Intercom over the last few months. Modern Macs are serious machines, and the ergonomics are hugely better.
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At @IntercomEng we just went three weeks without any out of hours pages. Plenty of stuff alarmed when we were in the office, but it's still very satisfying that our product and infrastructure doesn't rely on constantly interrupting engineers' lives to keep it working well.
No big deal - just my life partner getting awarded a Fulbright scholarship for research into diversity in technology. She'll be working in @UCBerkeley this time next year!
I'm not a Musk fanboi, but there's a vast distance between the two. From what I've read, Theranos was built on very little real science. Tesla and SpaceX were ambitious for sure, but were built on top of incremental progress based largely in reality.
Last week Intercom took the week off as a company holiday. I helped cover oncall and incident command, and we had to deal with the grand total of zero pages and incidents.
To get to this state we:
- build on reliable AWS services and re-use patterns and infrastructure where possible
- Alarm on customer facing metrics not symptoms
- Practice continuous improvement, reviewing every alarm that pages somebody and take action to ensure their value
