So the dumpster is on fire. Again. The site’s down. Your boss’s face is an ever-deepening purple. And you begin debating whether you should join the #incident channel or call an ambulance to deal with his impending stroke. Yes, we know this is a developer’s fault. There’s plenty of time for blame later. Postmortems have a macabre name because they were once intended to be Viking-like funerals for someone’s job. But we’re civilized now. Sort of. So we call them post-incident reviews. Fires are never going to stop. We’re human. We miss bugs. Or we fat finger a command – deleting dozens of servers and bringing down S3 in US-EAST-1 for hours – effectively halting the internet. These things happen.