Engineering

2022-05-18

The industry and markets are volatile right now. More than ever, you should be focused on shipping great products, retaining engineers, and building trust with customers. The right incident management strategy can help you make strides in all three.

2022-04-05

With a little planning now, you'll be able to cut your incident response time drastically.

2022-03-24

One of our core values at FireHydrant is continuous improvement. Our engineering team runs bi-annual hack weeks to create space for experimentation, optimization, and building things that we’re passionate about.

2021-11-11

A code freeze is intentionally halting changes to your codebase and environments in an effort to reduce the risk of an outage.On the surface, pausing on deployments feels like a logical solution to preventing incidents. Unfortunately, this isn't the case.

2021-10-01

Productivity revolves around quality. A Service Catalog helps promote this quality. So as your company strives to move faster, make sure quality moves with you.

2021-09-30

Reliability is not a metric that engineering alone controls, everyone in the business has a substantial stake in the reliability your customers feel.

2021-09-14

Our engineer Christine Yi's perspective on contributing to an open source project with the Backstage and FireHydrant plug in and the three key values she learned

2021-09-02

Learn some of the basics around building a service catalog and our philosophy around this growing space.

2021-06-17

We're using MirageJS to enable front-end and back-end teams to develop features asynchronously, without obstacles.

2021-06-10

We're over MTTR(esolution), but have you thought about MTTR(etro)?

2021-05-17

Our panel discussion, "WTF is Incident Management," generated some great insight from a group of very experienced industry professionals.

2021-03-29

Using the Crystal programming language, you can share developer tools quickly and easily. FireHydrant's Backend Engineer extraordinaire, Jon Anderson, walks us through the steps of testing shell commands with the CLI.

2021-02-23

Between 2021-02-05 00:20 and 2021-02-05 02:44, FireHydrant experienced an incident resulting in delayed runbook execution steps (Slack channel creation, etc) and intermittent availability issues on app.firehydrant.io. This is our incident retrospective.

2021-02-10

Why are we using the term 'postmortem' when no one died? In any other job, conducting a postmortem means someone perished, so we need to switch to another phrase to lessen the gruesomeness of software incidents. I wanted to provide some ideas that your organization could possibly run with as a replacement to “Postmortem.”

2020-12-04

We made it to our final episode! Thank you to everyone that tuned in and watched Bobby get a Terraform provider up and running. We hope you enjoyed watching me through the good, bad, and ugly these past 20 or so hours.

2020-11-20

In episode 9 of Throughput Thursdays, we work to configure a Runbook and get it to work! Watch part 1 of our two-part finale below to see what happens.

2020-11-13

In episode 8 of Throughput Thursdays, we break down all the logically grouped pieces into their own interfaces and create an interface on our client that can return.

2020-10-30

In episode 7, we create resources for managing teams and severities through the Terraform provider, which means we now can now manage more of users’ FireHydrant configurations with code.

2020-10-23

In Episode 6, we update our Terraform resource for FireHydrant functionalities and create a data source for FireHydrant services. This allows us to pull services from a list and link them to functionalities. Linking resources like this lets us do a lot of cool things with Terraform.

2020-10-21

At FireHydrant, we recently began to replace our usage of thunks with Sagas to handle our data fetching. Read how we moved from Redux Thunk to Redux-Saga.

2020-10-15

We’re pretty sure using a real incident to test a new response process is not the best idea. So, how do you test your process ahead of time? Learn how to use chaos engineering principles to stress test your incident management process.

2020-10-09

In this episode of Throughput Thursdays, we test our Terraform resources. If you missed it, you can watch it here.

2020-10-07

FireHydrant’s Slack integration is a great way to speed up your incident response, especially if FireHydrant Runbooks is automatically creating channels in your Slack workspace for each incident.

2020-10-02

In episode 4, we were able to achieve creating two full-blown Terraform resources for FireHydrant environments and functionalities. While simple resources, they unlock a lot of power that did not exist previously for teams that want to document their infrastructure using Terraform.

2020-09-28

Things are gearing up in our preparations for Chaos Conf by Gremlin. We're sponsoring the conference -- will we see you there?

2020-09-25

In episode 3, we built a flexible API client for our Terraform provider that implements a really simple interface. We also wrote some simple but effective tests and replaced the original cruft in the provider code with our new API client.

2020-09-21

Going API first will save you headaches in the long run. This post shares why choosing to go API first from Day 1 will be a game-changer for your business, and the decisions we made at FireHydrant to do this.

2020-09-18

In Episode 2, Bobby is live in Cape Cod, sitting on a dock about 4 inches from the edge of a lake. Last week we built a skeleton of a Terraform provider. Now we’ll get the provider to create and delete resources, like services in FireHydrant.

2020-09-16

Tori Crawford, one of our engineers, walks through some ways that you can get immersed in unfamiliar code. She gathered input and insights from the rest of the FireHydrant team to create this quick playbook on best practices that will make tackling any new codebase easier.

2020-09-11

In Episode 1, we started out the Terraform provider with a simple data resource against the FireHydrant API. We were able to successfully retrieve information about a single service and display its name in our terminal!

2020-09-02

Almost everyone knows that working with third-party APIs can be challenging. Sometimes the errors happen unexpectedly. Sometimes the error information that you receive is inaccurate. While most people feel these pains acutely, I’d like to share how we answer these challenges at FireHydrant and how it’s helped us avoid headaches and stress.

2020-06-24

We like to have fun when we build our product - read about how Rebecca Black's "Friday" snuck its way into our codebase.

2020-06-08

Due to the complexity of systems, it’s no longer a matter of “if” our systems will fail but “when”. To manage expectations for when our systems do fail, we can look no further than our Service Level Agreement.

2020-03-09

Here are 3 postmortem practices that embrace a blame-free culture.

2019-11-12

How to get past the nonsense and look at problems differently.

2019-10-09

Why distributing your on-call workload is critical.

2019-10-08

You like living on the edge, life is fun on the edge until the edge is a macOS major update. Then you use vibrantly colorful words, some that your dead ancestors heard, all because your development environment now doesn’t work in spectacular fashion.

2019-09-22

A story about open source.

2019-09-16

Redux powers our global state at FireHydrant, one of the things we use most heavily is the ability to let redux store our API errors to handle failure states on the UI. See how we're using Redux to power our global state at FireHydrant.

2019-08-28

How we updated our Kubernetes integration at FireHydrant.

2019-07-29

Incidents happen all the time because of bad code deploys. Defensive programming is great for codifying how a bug could be introduced, and raising an error right before it would happen, or choosing an alternative path. Here are some simple ideas to defend yourself against simple mistakes.

2019-05-28

We recently removed webpacker from our Rails 5 application. This is a summary of the steps you can take to use vanilla webpack in your Rails application.

2019-05-05

If you’re running a production application, you need metrics. In the Rails community, this is commonly achieved with NewRelic and Skylight; but we achieve visibility using Prometheus and Grafana. Check out this guide on how to use Rails with Prometheus.

2019-05-02

Istio is a hot technology right now. Giants such as Google and IBM have devoted entire teams of engineers to the project to push it to production readiness. Check out this post on getting to know Istio Ingress.

2019-05-01

Learn how to structure a Go application with Docker Compose as your development environment.

2019-05-01

Learn how to set up a new Rails app in Docker compose.

2019-05-01

Rails and ActiveRecord provide a simple interface for retrieving information from a database. With a few characters, I can retrieve all of my users with User.all. This simplicity is great, but it breaks down when you start doing more advanced queries.

2019-05-01

FireHydrant has a changelog feature with a Kubernetes integration - read how our changelog works with Kubernetes.

2019-04-23

At FireHydrant we use Redux Form for all of our forms. It is extremely easy to build complex form logic with all sorts of added bonuses that make using it in our React/Redux front end a no brainer. Learn how FireHydrant uses Redux Form.

2019-04-23

How FireHydrant is built to support creating data in our integration-ready platform.