Post-mortems is a curated collection of incident postmortems from major technology companies and services, organized by failure category to help developers learn from real-world outages.
The collection addresses the need for accessible learning material about how production systems fail and how teams respond. Rather than requiring developers to hunt through individual company blogs or internal documentation, the project aggregates postmortems in one place and organizes them by root cause—configuration errors, hardware failures, database issues, and others—making it straightforward to find relevant examples. The README provides direct links to original postmortem reports along with brief summaries of what went wrong and how it was resolved.
This resource suits developers and operators who want to understand failure modes before they happen in their own systems. It works well for incident response training, architecture review discussions, and building intuition about cascading failures. The collection spans companies of various scales and infrastructure complexity, so examples range from single-configuration typos that crashed entire networks to subtle schema mismatches that broke job distribution systems. Someone considering whether to use this should know it is a static reference collection rather than a tool or framework—its value lies in the patterns and lessons embedded in the incidents themselves.
The project accepts community contributions to expand the collection, though the maintainer notes delays in merging pull requests. Development activity is episodic rather than continuous, reflecting the nature of a curated reference that grows when new significant postmortems become public or when contributors discover historical incidents worth adding.
