The 3 AM Phone Rings Again: 7 Engineering Decisions for On-Call Rotation Design and Fatigue Management

Overview 3 AM. Your phone buzzes. P1 alert — order service 5xx error rate spiking. You drag yourself out of bed, fire up the laptop, pull logs, check Grafana, trace it to a saturated upstream database connection pool. Restart, scale up, recover. It’s 4:30 AM. The next morning, nursing dark circles in the standup, someone mentions that last night’s alert was actually a false positive. If you’ve worked in operations, you know this feeling....

August 25, 2026 · 24 mins · 4917 words · Xu Baojin

Building an SRE Team: From Hiring to Organizational Capability Model

Overview 3 AM. The core trading system is down. The on-call engineer frantically flips through the Runbook. The DBA says it’s not a database issue. The network team says the links are fine. The developers say nothing changed. Three teams point fingers at each other. Incident recovery drags on for 47 minutes. This is the reality of operations in many companies. The problem isn’t that people aren’t trying hard enough. The problem is there’s no engineering-driven reliability team to decompose the problem....

July 13, 2026 · 14 mins · 2883 words · Xu Baojin