SREcon24 Americas - Thawing the Great Code Slush

SREcon24 Americas - Thawing the Great Code Slush
Maude Lemaire, Slack
October 2020 wasn't a great month for Slack. Plagued with multiple hours-long outages, our engineering leadership team called for a code slush: all pull requests to our build and configuration mono-repo, aptly named "chef-repo", would need to be reviewed live, over Zoom, by a change advisory board (CAB) until further notice.
Five months later, CAB was still alive and well. We'd made some ergonomic improvements to the process, but development for our infrastructure team had slowed to a crawl.
Armed with a beginner's mindset- I'd only committed to the repo once under the new process- I decided to take matters into my own hands. What follows is a tale of building trust, making compromises, and slowly, but surely restoring our long-lost productivity without eroding reliability.
View the full SREcon24 Americas program at www.usenix.org...