What is Postmortem?
A meeting and document analysing what went wrong after an incident, focused on learning and prevention.
Why It Matters
Blameless postmortems help teams learn from failures and prevent the same issues from recurring.
Real-World Example
After a 2-hour outage, the team writes a postmortem documenting the cause, timeline, and changes to prevent recurrence.
“Understanding terms like Postmortem matters because it helps you have better conversations with developers and make smarter decisions about your software. You do not need to be technical. You just need to know enough to ask the right questions.”
Related Terms
Monitoring
Continuously observing your application and infrastructure to detect problems and understand performance.
Disaster Recovery
Plans and systems for restoring operations after major failures
Observability
The ability to understand what is happening inside your system by examining its outputs: logs, metrics, and traces.
Learn More at buildDay Melbourne
Want to understand these concepts hands-on? Join our one-day workshop and build a real web application from scratch.
Related Terms
Disaster Recovery
Plans and systems for restoring operations after major failures
Monitoring
Continuously observing your application and infrastructure to detect problems and understand performance.
Observability
The ability to understand what is happening inside your system by examining its outputs: logs, metrics, and traces.
Full-stack
Working on both the frontend (what users see) and backend (the server and database) of an application
TypeScript
JavaScript with added type checking that catches errors before your code runs
JavaScript
The programming language that makes websites interactive and dynamic