# 5 ways incidents made me a better engineer

DevFeed: [5 ways incidents made me a better engineer](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/5-ways-incidents-made-me-a-better-engineer-11839.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://incident.io/blog/incidents-made-me-a-better-engineer>)

Author: Lisa Karlin Curtis

Published: 2021-11-16T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The incident.io Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-incident-io-blog.md>)

Topics: [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident.md>), [Incident response](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident-response.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>), [Database](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/database.md>), [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>), [Replication](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/replication.md>), [Amazon Route 53](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/amazon-route-53.md>)

Tags: [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [concepts](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/concepts.md>), [database](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/database.md>), [dns](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/dns.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [incident-channel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-channel.md>), [incident-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-management.md>), [incident-response](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-response.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [post-mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/post-mortem.md>), [replication](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/replication.md>), [slack-incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/slack-incident.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/systems.md>)

## AI overview

The article explains how participating in incidents helped the author become a better engineer by building context, technical skill, and confidence. Incidents exposed gaps in understanding infrastructure, databases, asynchronous work, replication, quorum, DNS, and difficult system components. They also demonstrated the importance of designing code that fails safely rather than aiming for perfect code.

## Source excerpt

Incidents are a great opportunity to gather both context and skill. We should all take advantage of them.