Incidents are a great opportunity to gather both context and skill. They take people out of their day-to-day roles, and force ephemeral teams together to solve unexpected and challenging problems.

In my career, I've always found incidents can be a great accelerator - for both myself and others around me. They broaden your horizons, taking you to the edges of the systems you usually interact in day-to-day. Writing code that fails safely and loudly is one of the key differentiators for more senior engineers, and there’s no better way to learn how than seeing all the different ways that systems fail.

This talk discusses the different things that individuals and teams can learn from incidents, and gives a few suggestions that’ll help you and your teams get the best value from the incidents that you have.