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2024-10-23 Coverage improvement

· 3 min read

🗓️ Coverage and availability improvements​

Great teams (and great on-call) hinge around the ability to adapt to life. Making this process of sharing coverage around the team easy is a primary goal of Hotpot. Today, we're releasing the next iteration of our coverage tooling. It all hinges around this small addition:

Sometimes you are hard offline and other times you just need to step away.

This little radio select allows Hotpot to differentiate between being hard offline and just shifting responsibility to someone else. On Thursdays my family has a Happy Hour hangout. I'd prefer to not be on-call during this time, but I'm definitely reachable if necessary. On the other hand, if I need to be hard offline, Hotpot will help me find coverage for any and all responsibilities I have.

Entering time is faster with the addition of these handy shortcuts:

Clicking these will speed entry of common times. Also, what's up with those parens. Is this Lisp? Next we're gonna be cons-ing shifts.

Finally, we've heard your feedback about using the calendar to initiate availability entry on that date. Et voila!

Yes, macOS, i want to allow this recording.

📍 Navigational aids​

We got some feedback that y'all were looking around for things like organization settings and integrations. There's no reason to make you hunt, menu items are free! We popped them into the user menu alongside a little refresh.

Org settings and integrations are now easier to find. Sign out is red, too!

Our recent revamp of the schedule page made it hard to find the schedule's edit button. That's frustrating, so we plopped it right on top. Buttons are free!

Need to edit your schedule? It's right here, my dude!

🛠️ Integration setup ergonomics​

Hotpot is best with friends. Since Hotpot is basically a robot, so are its best friends… via integrations! Where is this joke going? To better documentation town, that's where! Every integration's setup page now has a helpful sidebar link to our documentation.

It's on the right with the pretty gradient. Click it!

Our integration docs are always in development, and those that need extra love are flagged for you to give us a holler. We'll help!

✉️ Email improvements​

Hotpot's on-call reminder emails have been revamped to be more informative when the stint has multiple folks involved... and to include some upcoming features that we're being quiet about.

It is a little known fact that Hotpot employees must shed their human names and adopt a random string. Apply at hotpot dot works slash careers.

💼 Other changes​

  • Integration: Improved the resilience PagerDuty webhook usage.
  • Notification: Calmed down some coverage notifications that got a bit eager and wanted to page people.
  • Schedule: Some form hints and copy have been clarified or improved.
  • Schedule: Our calendar was showing two of the same day. This experiment in space-time manipulation was successful… but at what cost? The program has been mothballed.
  • Schedule: Limit the week view to 7 days. I don't have the spiritual or mental energy for a 9 day work week, y'all.
  • Setup: Fixed some missing padding at medium screen sizes when viewing setup.
  • UI: Polished up a few boxes here and there, one which was naughtily allowing a badge to scamper freely at small screen sizes.