Feedback in case anybody from stripe is tuned in: I'd love to read these stories but not 6 around the same theme all at once. Like that it will take years (at your rate of publication, 4 times per year) to cover even the basics of running a complete operation. Please consider mixing different aspects for a single issue, both in the name of variety and to cover some ground in a reasonable time.<p>Other than that: thanks for publishing this, I've often wondered why there isn't a central repository (like a wiki or something like that) with the various recipes you can use to tackle a given problem and what works and what doesn't in practice.
> Susan Fowler joined Stripe to found and edit Increment and the first issue launches today.<p>BTW, this is the same Susan Fowler of ex-Uber fame: <a href="https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber" rel="nofollow">https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...</a> Congrats on the new position, Susan!<p>I'd be interested in hearing what it's like moving from a code-focused job to a content-focused job. Seems like a very unique shift!
Side-topic alert.<p>Stripe is my top design company these days. Just looking at their landing pages [1], [2], I'm deeply impressed by their effort on making the web beautiful.<p>Huge inspiration for me. Kudos to their front-end / design teams.<p>1: <a href="https://stripe.com/atlas" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/atlas</a>
2: <a href="https://stripe.com/connect" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/connect</a>
Thanks Stripe for advancing the industry by generating this content. I'm impressed with how broad they interpret their mission of increasing the GDP of the internet. Their Atlas program is the best example.<p>BTW on <a href="https://stripe.com/about" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/about</a> I only found "Help us build the universal payments infrastructure of the internet." but it is listed on <a href="https://stripe.com/press" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/press</a><p>Disclosure: I'm interviewed in one of the pieces <a href="https://increment.com/on-call/the-benefits-of-transparency/" rel="nofollow">https://increment.com/on-call/the-benefits-of-transparency/</a>
I was surprised to see no discussion of an oncall bonus or compensation in the first issue of Increment. This is a practice which is uncommon but not rare in the industry; Google, for instance, offers generous compensation to developers with a serious oncall shift.<p>It would be interesting to see a discussion of this topic, but I suppose this is expected if a publication is published by a company rather than by laborers directly.
Great work - love reading this stuff.<p>As a sort of mini-rant - with so much 'incident transparency' with Slack, Email, Dashboards, Hangouts, etc high-sev issues can devolve into all hands events if you haven't nailed the culture as well. These can be intensely political - where you got random managers/execs who haven't touched code in years in the Slack channel trying to look engaged and competent offering suggestions like, "Have we tried rolling back the release?" and the smart engineers who could actually fix the problem are afraid to do anything because everything they do is broadcasted to the entire company. It's relatively easy to adopt the tools and processes of successful tech companies but it's hard to get the culture.
Any chance of getting this in kindle/e-reader compatible format? The website is beautiful, but reading long-form content is so much nicer on e-ink.
Impressed by Stripe's marketing strategy. With the acquisition of IndieHackers.com and now this, they're taking content marketing to the next level.
One of the things that stuck me when reading Susan Fowler's Uber article, was just how well written it was. It gives me a lot of hope for this magazine.
Not sure what to make of this, given the redundant, monochromatic content about being on-call. It doesn't appeal to me. A magazine format is not appropriate for such a narrow focus. You're not going to gain the continuing readership without a sufficiently broad appeal.<p>Also, the introduction of putting down the rest of the industry while simultaneously extolling your own ideas is very off-putting, especially if we haven't heard them yet. The strength of the Stripe brand matters not; I do not know who you are.<p>That said, Stripe is a great company and I'd love to hear more about how they are doing things. But please, if you want me to pay attention to you, sans the hubris self-congratulatory tone.
There are multiple ways to successfully organize teams of software developers.<p>What matters most is that the choices are consistent and coherent.<p>It's nice to read about practices that work in one environment, but you have to keep in mind how they integrate in to the big picture of all of the choices.<p>For instance, some teams branch everywhere, for everything. Which is fine, and some people do it to great success.<p>Some teams develop at head, for everything. Which is fine, and some people do it to great success.<p>But the tools you need to build around those two approaches are totally different. Reading about the tools and techniques, without understanding how they all fit together, and trying to adopt them because they work for other people, could be a recipe for disaster.
Interesting, Will Larson [1] was also a manager at Uber, probably worked with Susan in the past.<p>[1] : <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-larson-a44b543/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-larson-a44b543/</a>
I like that the "Ask an Expert" about on-call emergencies section has an answer from Phil Calçado (Director of Product Engineering at DigitalOcean)<p>Made me chuckle.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/update-on-the-apri.." rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/update-on-the-apri...</a>. (for anyone who missed them nuking the production db).
Netflix never pre-announced their series of extremely useful videos because they were just useful and people watched them in droves often being top results on Hacker News. Youtube + articles are nice for that sort of thing and I don't see a reason to deviate from that if the content is actually worth viewing.
I love how Stripe does so many things that provide value to the developer community from their awesome blog posts to their open source retreats and now finally to this magazine. They're a model to me of how to earn the good will of your users through providing authentic value.
Nice, I'd been wishing for a "devops" book full of case studies - what situations teams were in and how they handled it. Occasionally you get an engineering blog post, but most of those are just boasting unilaterally about a solution, and not any critical discussion of the problem or the myriad of bandaids most of us have to deal with.<p>This might be a step in the right direction.
Will Stripe discuss their choice to selectively enforce their own TOS? I'm sure many start-up business would like to know how to pick and choose when they enforce their own TOS