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Taking oncall responsibilities is one of the best ways to fully understand a system. While it can be stressful at times, it teaches you a lot on building reliable software systems. I’ve taken on-call responsibilities for most of my career. Here, I have listed some tips that I have found useful while handling oncall and while training others to take oncall. Before Outage Be aware of all the touchpoints your clients interact with your system, for example REST API layers, HDFS Data, etc Know each and every components of the systems you handle, and periodically ensure that you have required access to each of them Maintain a runbook to refer to, even for trivial fixes. Engineers often tend to forget how to perform trivial fixes if they haven’t done them for a long time Maintain links to all system related dashboards, graphs, log analysis tools etc in a single place so you don’t go hunting for these during an incident. ...

You can head to https://flightoverme.pages.dev/ and check it out and then come back to read this blog post. Why Whenever a flight is about to pass over me, I’ve always wondered which flight it is, which airline it belongs to, and where it’s going from and to. I also try to keep track of all the flights I’ve taken in the Flighty app, and I frequently use sites like Flightradar to see which flights are going where and what other flights are at the airport I’m sitting at. Some of these websites and third-party apps do have an option to see flights near me. However, I wanted a website where, along with the flights, I could also learn cool facts about the flight or airline, the speed at which it is travelling, and have a clean interface without any ads. This way, I can easily view which flight is flying over me. ...