My company uses an SFTP (secure file transfer protocol) to share report files with clients. This week, we took some time to focus on the capacity of our SFTP and contingencies if we ever have to add more space. A member of my team was asked to build a dashboard and a monitor in Datadog and, though I had no idea where to start, I volunteered to help if I could.

Luckily for us, we got an assist from another member of our team who has a lot more experience with Datadog. I quickly got lost watching him deftly navigate…

This month at work, I’m trying to graduate from understanding individual processes to understanding a full pipeline of data from frontend to back end. As a Solutions Engineer, I’m frequently asked to diagnose an issue with data failing to make it all the way through a pipeline with clues like “we’re seeing a network call on the front end, but no corresponding row in Snowflake on the back end.” I learned that, in my workplace, these questions are often difficult to answer because our back end EventHandler doesn’t actually build rows in a DB. …

This week, I got the chance to work with an experienced developer while we investigated whether our code was degrading performance on a client’s site. This was totally new to me, so I mostly watched as he quickly collected data and traced function calls. Many of us have probably seen a chart like this before:

I wanted to better understand how to use this tool and how to read the results. So of course the next logical step is…to blog about it!

Generating a Performance Sample

Before going any further, I should point out that Google has done a great job of documenting this…

A few weeks ago, I wrote about building a Chrome extension that would help my team check on the filter status of certain conditionally rendered elements. After finishing a draft of the extension, I was all set to publish it to the Chrome Web Store, but paused when I realized there was a small fee to register as a developer. The next Monday, I asked around to see if our company had a developer account that I could use to publish the extension. …

This week, I was working on writing a configuration to collect data from a webpage each time a certain button was clicked. My logic was working about 75% of the time, but I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong for the other 25% (likely caused by a race condition somewhere). I consulted the Engineer who built the infrastructure that I was working with and he let me know that he was working on a new possible solution for issues like this which included the use of XPath. …

By now, we’re all familiar with the TypeScript codebase I use at work. The code relies on a lot of abstraction and I’m getting better at using it without having to figure out how every piece works. But when I notice unexpected behavior, I have to be prepared to use what I know about TypeScript and JavaScript to dig deep into the code. This week, I wrote a configuration that worked just fine in certain circumstances, but threw this error in others:

This was a busy week at work, but one where I learned a lot more about the internal workings of our systems than general concepts that I can share. For the first time in a while, I woke up on Saturday morning without knowing what I was going to write about! I was tempted to take the weekend off, but I know myself well enough to realize that if I break my routine I might never come back to it. …

This customer is a churn risk and they’d really like this report ready by the end of the week, can anybody pick up this ticket? Sometimes it’s our turn to say yes to something even though we’d rather not volunteer. If you’ve ever been there, congrats on making it out on the other side.

At work this week, I was the one who grabbed the tricky ticket and thanks to support from some SQL and DB experts on my team, I got the report done. In retrospect, it wasn’t anything too revolutionary, but it might be worth breaking things down…