Rain Lag

How a simple rotating paper “lighthouse” on your desk can surface quiet system warnings, reduce alert fatigue, and help high‑velocity engineering teams catch weak signals before they break production.

How a low‑tech, stacked-paper “incident aquarium” can teach multi-layered outage analysis, reduce downtime, and turn abstract reliability concepts into a shared, inspectable skyline of stories.

How to turn software outages into uncanny, memorable “specimens” in a metaphorical glass-walled incident aquarium—using analog horror aesthetics, ICS-inspired structure, and a mix of intuition and telemetry to build a culture of continuous learning.

How to design a near-miss reporting and incident management platform that turns close calls into early-warning signals, supported by hybrid tabletop exercises that test real readiness before real disasters.

How to use tracing, context propagation, and dependency-aware diagrams to build a mental (and visual) ‘orbital model’ of incident spread in distributed systems—and design smaller blast radii before outages happen.

How a simple rotating paper “harbor” on your desk can transform incident reviews from dry technical reports into living stories that improve reliability, resilience, and team culture.

Imagine your software system as a miniature solar system, where tiny failures orbit like comets and planets. This post explores the “Incident Story Observatory Dome” — an analog, desk-sized planetarium for visualizing dependencies, incident trajectories, and how LLM-powered mission control can help you predict and steer incidents before they crash.

How to build a low-tech, high-insight 360° “greenhouse dome” panorama that turns your system’s riskiest seasons into a shared, story-based learning artifact for teams.

How to use low‑fidelity “paper ecosystems,” feature flags, simulations, and structured risk practices to safely grow fragile new features before full rollout.

How to turn your incident history into a star‑filled, response‑centric planetarium that quietly teaches teams about resilience, interdependence, and better responses to future outages.