Published February 14, 2018 in Statuspage

Be kind during downtime: spread #HugOps love today (and every day)

Published in Statuspage
Shannon Winter
Shannon Winter

Sr. Brand Manager

https://twitter.com/vmbrasseur/status/948737077339832321?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fextranet.atlassian.com%2Fdisplay%2FSTAT%2F%2523HugOps%2BValentine%2527s%2BDay%2BBlog%2BPost%2B-%2BDRAFT

Have you ever seen a tweet like this and wondered what it was?

It’s #HugOps!

We’re sending you some giant #HugOps today (and every day), and hope that after reading this you feel inspired to pass on some #HugOps, too.

Hold up…What is HugOps?

Put simply, HugOps is a way to celebrate the human, empathetic side of building, shipping, and running software. It is a take on the word “DevOps” (breaking down silos between Dev and Ops teams through communication, empathy, etc. to ultimately ship faster), but it extends to folks on all different Software, Support, and IT teams. It is a means of acknowledging the real humans working 24/7 to keep the services we rely on running as naturally as water; it exhalts empathy, cross-team collaboration, and trust as the keys to finding problems and shipping solutions faster; and it is a feel good Twitter movement that is much welcomed on a platform that sees its fair share of negativity and trolling. While #HugOps are typically shared during outages, we love the idea of using it when things are going right, too. Like sending flowers or candy or pizza to your friend or partner “just because.”

What better day to start spreading digital hugs than the day of all-the-things-love-and-hearts? This Valentine’s Day we are declaring our love for you, our dear customers. Whether you’re building and shipping software, answering customer questions and troubleshooting their problems, or putting out fires when the inevitable bug creeps in or downtime strikes, we see the often invisible, thankless work y’all put in to keep the internet up and running.

#HugOps in the Wild

If you ever need a pick-me-up, scroll through this feed to go down a happy #HugOps rabbit hole. We’ve collected some of our favorite recent #HugOps tweets that help highlight what what this philosophy is all about:

@pnyak_ showed us that HugOps = empathy + patience:

@joelaha showed us that HugOps matters even in sports:

 @marcprecipice showed us that there is no outage an Elf gif can’t help:

@elenawashington showed us that HugOps are a nice gift when you’re on call over Christmas:

and @amyngyn showed us the positive behavior change that #HugOps encourages:

What HugOps means to us

At Statuspage we are in the business of helping our customers be more transparent about downtime (and uptime) with their end users. We see teams in their worst times, and we help them celebrate their best. Because of this, we have established a lot of relationships over the years with the humans behind the status pages, and think they are pretty rad, hard-working people who deserve appreciation.  In a recent survey, Pagerduty found that more than half (51.3%) of IT professionals surveyed experience sleep and/or personal life interruptions due to a digital service disruption or outage more than 10 times per week. 10 times per week! Can you imagine? They deserve some real thanks for showing up when we need them most. So let’s thank them – not just today or on National Sysadmin Day (it’s real and it’s on July 27th) – with #HugOps galore. If you’re already contributing to the HugOps movement, keep spreading the Twitter love. If you’re just learning about it, we hope you’ll join the fun.

Spread some #HugOps love

Remember how exciting it was to get paper valentines in elementary school? Being able to eat your weight in candy hearts and chocolate was definitely a large part of appeal (how could you not love a holiday that causes Americans to collectively buy 58 million pounds of chocolate?!), but it was also just nice to give and receive love on a random day in February. While it would be nearly impossible for us to send physical valentine’s out to everyone we appreciate, we wanted to create something we could share with you (and you could in turn share with your team, your friends, and your favorite companies), to thank them for keeping the things you rely on most up 99.99% of the time.

These are our digital #HugOps. We hope you heart them as much as we do.

Be kind during downtime: spread #HugOps love today (and every day)