2024-09-18 Availability work

Details of Hotpot release for 2024-09-18.

Hotpot aims to make scheduling as effortless as possible, including dealing with unexpected schedule changes. Getting coverage because you've got an unexpected appointment or something similar should take just a few clicks to solve. This release significantly improves Hotpot's ability to do just that!

Making yourself unavailable

Hotpot creates schedules about a month in the future. Hotpot will protect your time when you enter a future vacation or other obligation. If you need to be unavailable when you've already been scheduled, Hotpot will help you ensure proper coverage.

When you enter your time, Hotpot will check for any issues and help you set up replacement coverage if needed! It even renders a preview on the right, allowing you to choose your replacement.

Osman is on-call during his dentist appointment, but Hotpot can help!

Getting coverage

The same applies for coverage. If you realize you or someone else is on-call and a change is needed, you can click the coverage button and Hotpot will guide you through coverage.

Hotpot is helping find a replacement for Adrian.

Because Hotpot knows the schedule, it's helping you pick a person who is not already on-call!

Additionally, Hotpot will create an unavailable slot for the time in question so Adrian is not accidentally selected for another stint!

Optional assignees

One of the frustrating parts of current on-call tools is the need to barter and trade with your teammates to find someone who can cover your shift. As of today, Hotpot allows you to create coverage and defer the choice of assignee. This allows your team to jump in and grab the time asynchronously. Teammates can just smash the assign button and take the time!

This stint needs coverage, and you can grab it by hitting that button!

Getting approval (or not)

Setting up coverage can feel intimidating. What if you get something wrong? What if the other person doesn't know you've made the change? Hotpot now supports acknowledgement-based coverage. If enabled for your schedule, Hotpot will require acknowledgment before becoming official.

This setting is turned off by default for all schedules. Drop us a line if you'd like to enable it for your team!

Scheduling improvements

• Wired up some feature flags to better support customers who do not use SMS/Voice features.

• Allow for scheduled membership when a user has not provided us with a phone number.

• Improve handling of situations where the handoff time is changed for a schedule.

• Handle stint durations that are not seven days correctly.

• Drop the requirement that coverage durations be in 15-minute increments.

• Submitting unassigned or unaccepted assignments with an error now shows form as expected.

Other changes

• Backend: Added a backend data validation job that helps us validate migrations before performing them.

• Comms: Bail out if we get to the "time to prepare" email and can't find the right user.

• Integrations: Added Honeycomb webhook integration.

• Integrations: Added a backend tool for testing Datadog integrations.

• Moments: Fix a problem in ingestion wherein invalid integrations could cause failure.

• Moments: Improve timing of moment post-processing.

• Onboarding: Legibility, phrasing, and styling of setup actions have been improved.

• Slack: Shore up forecast messaging against some bad data use cases.

• Slack: Fix a bug creating moments.

• UI: Add an option to display the duration of a time range.

• UI: Fix long group names overflowing the handoff sidebar.

• UI: Made a lot of small tweaks to alignment, spacing, and sizing.