Sometimes Boring is Best

As I stood in the rain as a volunteer race marshal at my local park run, it occurred to me that I wanted the same thing when running applications in production, and that's absolutely nothing to happen.

The last thing I wanted to do was be a hero.

🎸 "Always keep on the right side of the path" – the Parkrun version of Monty Python's song.

I'd rather everyone enjoy a safe, smooth race where I can cheer and encourage people on as they pass, reminding them to keep to the right so they don't collide with runners coming the other way.

It's the same in the land of IT. The only thing I want to see when viewing Grafana dashboards is a sea of green, 200 status codes and steady traffic patterns.

What's So Bad About Heroes?

Whilst working with consultants on a client engagement, one of my colleagues questioned why we were celebrating someone waking up at 3 AM to "rescue" the application with Superman emojis.

At first, I didn't agree, but then I saw their point.

Reactive, heroic behaviour creates great headlines and attention, but sometimes we should aim for clicking clock levels of excitement.

After all, the best work in designing, building, architecting, and deploying is often the work nobody notices.