6 ms·

>"Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over. is it? outside of autopsies, i think i have only ever

>"Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over. is it? outside of autopsies, i think i have only ever seen it used as a synonym for "incident report". i dont think ive ever associated the term specifically with the end of a project. e.g. cloudflare uses the tag for all of their incident reports (https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/post-mortem/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/post-mortem/), not as a signal that they are closing shop

sho_hn 7mo ago
Gamasutra has a famous line of articles where game developers provide retrospectives on how the development of their titles went, maybe I'm influenced by that. I'm aware about the use in incident reports of course, but then you still don't call it "<project name> Post-Mortem" but use a more specific namespace.
throwaway_ocr 7mo ago
In the incident case, it's a post-mortem on the incident. The incident itself is (hopefully) resolved and can now be dissected to learn about what went wrong and how things can improve in the future. That's what a post-mortem implies to me in the tech industry. A thing happened, it's over now, here are the lessons we learned to take into the future.
- sho_hn 7mo ago
  Yes, but Bazzite is not over.
  - snapplebobapple 7mo ago
    If you read the article, way down at the end he pulls it around. He means it's dead as a serious os that vendors can ship. It'll live on for hobbyists but you better be prepared for a bumpy ride as the YOLO crew hits send on increasingly larger amounts of stuff before its ready and continue to act unprofessionally (my paraphrase, but I believe I captured it).
kevinrineer 7mo ago
> ... as a synonym for "incident report" People should stop using it as a synonym, then. The Latin effectively means "after death", meaning its a poor synonym for "what happened wrong recently".
- hiccup_socks 7mo ago
  >The Latin effectively means "after death" language evolves over time post mortem is even in dictionaries (meriam, oxford, american heritage) as "an analysis or review of a finished event"
  - ktm5j 7mo ago
    "Finished" being an important word. Seems like this Bazzite project is not finished and so post mortem is in fact a poor choice of words.
    - tecoholic 7mo ago
      We are splitting hairs here probably. After reading the article it looks like the author wrote it as a look back on their relationship with bazzite. A more descriptive one could be “bazzite and me - a post mortem” or something. It doesn’t come across as a bad faith title, at least to me

sho_hn 7mo ago

Gamasutra has a famous line of articles where game developers provide retrospectives on how the development of their titles went, maybe I'm influenced by that. I'm aware about the use in incident reports of course, but then you still don't call it "<project name> Post-Mortem" but use a more specific namespace.

throwaway_ocr 7mo ago

In the incident case, it's a post-mortem on the incident. The incident itself is (hopefully) resolved and can now be dissected to learn about what went wrong and how things can improve in the future. That's what a post-mortem implies to me in the tech industry. A thing happened, it's over now, here are the lessons we learned to take into the future.

sho_hn 7mo ago
Yes, but Bazzite is not over.
- snapplebobapple 7mo ago
  If you read the article, way down at the end he pulls it around. He means it's dead as a serious os that vendors can ship. It'll live on for hobbyists but you better be prepared for a bumpy ride as the YOLO crew hits send on increasingly larger amounts of stuff before its ready and continue to act unprofessionally (my paraphrase, but I believe I captured it).

kevinrineer 7mo ago

> ... as a synonym for "incident report" People should stop using it as a synonym, then. The Latin effectively means "after death", meaning its a poor synonym for "what happened wrong recently".

hiccup_socks 7mo ago
>The Latin effectively means "after death" language evolves over time post mortem is even in dictionaries (meriam, oxford, american heritage) as "an analysis or review of a finished event"
- ktm5j 7mo ago
  "Finished" being an important word. Seems like this Bazzite project is not finished and so post mortem is in fact a poor choice of words.
  - tecoholic 7mo ago
    We are splitting hairs here probably. After reading the article it looks like the author wrote it as a look back on their relationship with bazzite. A more descriptive one could be “bazzite and me - a post mortem” or something. It doesn’t come across as a bad faith title, at least to me