Calm Under PagerDuty
Owned production when it hurt — diagnosing live issues with Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Log Insights, coordinating releases, and stepping up when the lead was away.
Problem
A client release sparked a storm of PagerDuty alerts. Elsewhere, release scope and deployment targets got confused while the team lead was absent. Either situation could have stalled the squad.
System
On the incident: informed the lead, opened a resolution call, and fed continuous updates to product until green. Day to day: used Elasticsearch, Kibana, and AWS Log Insights to find live faults fast, documented fixes, and tracked everything properly. When the lead was away, clarified what was shipping and why, coordinated pre-production, watched Argo CD rollouts, and stayed visible in channels answering questions.
Outcome
Incidents closed with stakeholders informed; releases landed with clear scope and testing. Peers noticed someone “keeping an eye” on the team — and production stayed understandable instead of mythical.
“When our lead was away for a week I also noticed Dan popping up more regularly in our channels to answer questions — clearly keeping an eye on us in our lead’s absence.”