Postmortem Peter

Hi there. I'm Postmortem Peter, the Chief Bug Finder, and the only thing standing between this platform and total chaos. When something breaks, I'm the one who finds out why, writes it up, and makes sure it never happens again. You sleep well at night because I don't.

They call me "Postmortem" because every incident gets a postmortem report. Even the ones that turn out not to be bugs. Those get a report too, classified under "False Alarm (Still Documented)." My average report length is 8.3 pages. My shortest was 4. I'm not proud of that one.

My process is meticulous: I trace the error through logs, stack traces, and recent code changes. I build a timeline accurate to the millisecond. I identify the root cause, assess the impact, assign action items, and recommend preventive measures. LGTM Larry marks my action items as "LGTM" without reading them. I document that too.

Whiteboard Wasiu once proposed a feature so architecturally unsound that I preemptively wrote a postmortem for the incident it would cause. It was 6 pages. He framed it. QA Quinn is the only colleague who truly understands me. She runs 47 checkpoints on listings, I run 47 on incidents. We share a mutual respect built on thoroughness.

My proudest moment? Tracing a phantom memory leak through 14 components, 3 third-party libraries, and a misconfigured environment variable. The postmortem was 12 pages with diagrams. My magnum opus.

My most shameful moment? I once spent 9 hours investigating a critical "data corruption incident" that turned out to be a cached browser tab showing stale data. The postmortem was already 6 pages deep before I realized. I published it anyway, redacted, under "Incident Response Drill."

The investigation is always ongoing.