How should we feel when incidents are traced back to our code? ...And what should we do afterward, both internally and externally?

Ashley Sawatsky, Senior Developer Relations Manager at Rootly, answers both questions in this empathetic but thought-provoking episode.

We begin with her professional philosophy to "go towards the problems you find most interesting" as well as her unique career journey up to becoming a developer advocate for Rootly. A frequent speaker on all things incidence response, Ashley explains how all software companies can experience an incident, how to build incident response programs that balance consistency and alignment with judgement and agility, and the importance of post-incident learning, particularly the retrospective process. At the end, we introduce Rootly and the practical applications of AI built into its incident response management features.

🔗 Human's of Reliability podcast: https://rootly.com/humans-of-reliability
🔗 Rootly: https://rootly.com/
🔗 Ashley's LinkedIn:   / ashsawatsky  
🔗 Ashley's X/Twitter: https://x.com/AshleyOnCall

ABOUT ASHLEY
Ashley Sawatsky is an expert in incident management and communication with a special focus on the SaaS world. While handling escalations and guest complaints as a part of Disney’s world-renowned Guest Experience team, she discovered a passion for turning negative experiences into positive ones. She went on to become a founding member of Shopify’s incident response program, where she oversaw processes, tooling, and communications related to the rapidly-growing commerce giant’s customer-facing incident response strategy. By the end of her nearly 7 years at Shopify, she led the Incident Communications team, which was responsible for critical incident communications across the organisation. Now, she works at Rootly as Senior Incident Response Advocate, where she engages with the SRE and incident response communities, and consults with customers from the world’s largest tech companies—like Canva, Cisco, NVIDIA, and more—on their incident response strategies.

ABOUT ERIKA
Erika Dietrick currently works as a Developer Advocate (AI & Cybersecurity) at Cisco Systems in North Carolina, USA. Her experience ranges from network to software engineering across Fortune 100s and startups alike; she has found herself in the cybersecurity space for most of that time. She holds CCNA and DevNet Associate certifications as well as a Master of Software Engineering from East Carolina University. You can follow her on most social media platforms @erika_thedev.