Thawing the Great Code Slush
summary
After October 2020 outages a live, Zoomed change advisory board (CAB) freezes Chef repo for seven months and costs roughly $5,000 weekly; response is to build cab deputies training, a quiz of real Chef-repo PRs, and badges. Reviewers score PRs via a risk matrix (observability, resiliency, readiness, rescue, blast radius) with 1–4 scales, automate data via the GitHub API and Test Kitchen, and require an 80% pass. Outcome: 220 deputies, 234 quiz submissions, Chef-repo PR velocity recovers and meetings are retired.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction and background
- 4:19The infrastructure crisis
- 7:22Implementing the CAB
- 10:49Challenges and the code slush
- 15:59Identifying the bottleneck
- 21:23Creating the cab deputies
- 25:08Training and documentation
- 32:42Operationalizing the program
- 35:11Outcomes and conclusions
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