050 - How Do You Run a Blameless Incident Postmortem?

A postmortem that ends with a name instead of a root cause wasted everyone's time in the room.Andy and Eric Siron pull from a combined several-decades of incident reviews to break down what a postmortem actually is, what kind of outage earns one, and who really needs to be at the table. The throughline: keep it blameless without making it unaccountable, separate root cause from contributing factors, and remember that the follow-through is the entire point. Whether your postmortem is sixty people in a war room or just you writing a summary for one nervous boss, the discipline scales.## CHAPTERS00:00:00 - Why Postmortems Matter00:01:31 - Welcome and Show Plugs00:04:29 - News React: AI Job Hype Walkbacks, Teams Pain, Oracle Layoffs, AMD Trust00:17:42 - News React: Ubiquiti UniFi OS Max-Severity RCE CVEs00:19:41 - Nerd Hour: Claude Code, Hugo, and Pandoc00:23:36 - The Incident Postmortem Process00:26:40 - What Actually Earns a Postmortem00:29:22 - Who Needs To Be In the Room00:38:49 - Blameless, Not Unaccountable00:46:50 - What Information To Gather00:50:33 - Running the Review00:55:15 - Follow Through Is the Whole Point## RESOURCES / SHOW NOTES- SysAdmin Weekly home and show links: https://www.sysadminweekly.com- SysAdmin Weekly companion newsletter: https://newsletter.sysadminweekly.com- AndyOnTech: https://www.andyontech.com- Project Runspace: https://www.projectrunspace.org- BleepingComputer - Ubiquiti patches three max-severity UniFi OS RCE flaws (CVE-2026-34908, CVE-2026-34909, CVE-2026-34910): https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ubiquiti-patches-three-max-severity-unifi-os-vulnerabilities/- Postmortem markdown template (free, CC BY 4.0, version-tracked in the show repo): https://github.com/ProjectRunspace/sysadmin-weekly/blob/main/resources/postmortem_markdown_process_template.md- Pandoc, universal document converter (Markdown to docx): https://pandoc.org- Hugo, the Markdown-driven static site generator: https://gohugo.io