bctl oncall

bctl oncall manages our on-call roster. The source of truth is a single file, data/schedule.oncall, that holds both the roster (who is in which rotation) and the week-by-week shift assignments.

Updating schedule.oncall

• to swap shifts with someone, edit schedule.oncall - click here to edit in github.dev
• to add someone to the oncall roster, add them to roster_by_rotation then run bctl oncall check --fix

schedule.oncall file format

The file has three types of data:

• oncall metadata, defined in YAML comments between BEGIN_ONCALL_METADATA and END_ONCALL_METADATA
• the schedule itself: YYYY-MM-DD <rotation>=<person> <rotation>=<person> ...
• # indicates comments

Tooling

• bctl oncall check [--fix] parses schedule.oncall and validates it, ensuring that the file is well-formed
  • runs on every change to schedule.oncall
• bctl oncall notify [--post-to-slack]
  • post to #oncall with a message about who's currently oncall, who was last oncall, and upcoming oncalls
  • runs weekly Friday 9am PT, posting to Slack to notify whoever's oncall (1h drift for PST/PDT is fine)
• bctl oncall fill-schedule [--post-to-slack]
  • append weekly shifts to schedule.oncall, assigning in a round-robin pattern