Rain Lag

How a small team at the fictional Street Map Cafe uses paper-first incident rituals, FRACAS, and lightweight roles to turn outages into a daily reliability practice between deploys.

How to turn recurring outages into paper escape routes using blameless postmortems, tabletop exercises, and fault tree analysis—the "analog incident story maze drawer" your systems desperately need.

How a ‘switchyard’ mindset, paper incident boards, and cross‑team drills can stop tiny failures from cascading into major outages in complex software systems.

How low‑tech, paper-based ‘story wind tunnels’ can uncover high‑impact reliability gaps—before your next production outage.

How to build a miniature, paper-based replica of your production system—an "incident story trainyard"—to safely replay real outages, explore resilience gaps, and involve the whole organization without touching live infrastructure.

How simple, paper-level incident logging experiments can evolve into powerful, automated reliability systems—and help you control reliability debt before it quietly takes over your stack.

How to turn cardboard, paper, and a bit of game design thinking into powerful, low‑tech incident response drills your team will actually want to run.

Invisible outages and near misses are the weak signals of future failures. This post explores how to design a lightweight, daily ritual—a “paper terminus”—that honors the human side of reliability and helps teams surface, share, and learn from small incidents before they become disasters.

How to turn your smallest, quietest incidents into a powerful library of runbooks that cut MTTA/MTTR, improve resilience, and pave the way to intelligent, automated response.

How to turn one painful outage into a reusable, empathy-building learning ritual using a “ferris wheel” of stakeholder perspectives.