Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind • Bryan Cantrill • GOTO 2017

Why HN readers recommended it

A perennial HN recommendation for outage and postmortem threads, praised as funny, educational and one of the best postmortems anyone has seen.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

GOTO Conferences

Topic

incident response and postmortems

Format

talk

Level

intermediate

HN recommenders in dataset

8

HN mentions in dataset

17

Recommendation years in dataset

2018–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• Perhaps not famous, but Bryan Cantrill, who gives my favorite talks, has an interesting and funny talk on one of the Joyent outages: [VIDEO]

• Time to share one of my favorite talks (and speakers) ever - "Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind" (Bryan Cantrill, GOTO 2017) [VIDEO]

• The best postmortem I've seen was actually a conference talk: "Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind" by Bryan Cantrill (in the GOTO conference, 2017) Here's a YouTube video of it: [VIDEO] Here's the slides: [LINK] It goes into detail …