November 2024 Summaries

AWS re:Invent is a major event for developers and software engineers with over 3,000 sessions. The event features various session types including breakout sessions, chalk talks, workshops, builders' sessions, lightning talks, and code talks. Some key sessions include "Scaling on AWS for the first 10 million users", "The modern CI/CD toolbox: Strategies for consistency and reliability", "CEO Keynote with Matt Garman", "Try again: The tools and techniques behind resilient systems", "Dr. Werner Vogels Keynote", and "Using observability for effective incident response". These sessions cover topics such as scaling infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, system resilience, incident management, and developer experience at AWS.

The company is expanding its global presence by opening a new office in San Francisco, adding to its existing locations in London and New York. This move will be led by Chief Revenue Officer Mohit Bijlani, with key team members relocating to establish the company culture and context. The San Francisco office aims to be operational by January 2025. The decision to open an office in San Francisco is based on several factors: proximity to many current and potential customers, a high concentration of GTM talent, improved customer support capabilities, and successful experience working across time zones. The company is currently hiring for various roles within its Go To Market team.

Rory Malcolm, Product Engineer at incident.io, shares his favorite memories, values, benefits, Slack channels, and advice for newcomers. He highlights the close-knit relationship between Product and Engineering teams and emphasizes the importance of a reliable incident management tool in ensuring smooth operations. His favorite customer interaction was when he quickly built a feature that made a customer's life easier, showcasing the personal connection between engineering and customers at incident.io.

The text discusses how incident.io runs on a monolith, which has its own set of advantages such as not worrying about internal network requests speed, complex deployments, or optimizing work that touches multiple services. However, defining ownership in a monolith can be challenging. To address this issue, the author explains how they link their code to the team that owns it, ensuring errors and alerting are routed to the right place with minimal maintenance burden. They divide their codebase into chunks that can sensibly be assigned to a single team, assign ownership to each subfolder in these packages, and encode this information using module files. The author also provides guidance on how to handle fallbacks when no team is assigned.

Incident.io, a provider of incident management software, manages sensitive data such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and confidential details regarding customer incidents in their BigQuery data warehouse. They approach the management of this data with care by default masking all new columns from their transactional database in BigQuery. The workflow includes several key components: establishing a taxonomy, creating policy tags for PII and confidential information, implementing a scheduled daily job to scan all tables in their transactional database within BigQuery and applying policy tags to any untagged columns, and using dbt for data transformations. They have divided their dbt pipeline into two distinct streams - one is customer-facing with full access to sensitive information, while the other is used for internal analytics with access to sensitive data in a masked format.

Dani Unsworth, Head of Talent at incident.io, shares her favorite memories, values, benefits, Slack channels, and advice for new hires in this Behind the Flame series. She emphasizes the importance of finding a way to adapt and scale as part of the Talent team. Dani also highlights the company's strong culture, which is driven, transparent, and kind. She discusses her role in scaling teams and improving data reporting within incident.io.

The text discusses the design principles behind the data warehouse of a company. It follows dbt labs' high-level approach for data modeling, dividing the data warehouse into staging (stg_[source]__[model name]), intermediate (int_[source]__[model name]), and marts layers (dim/fct for internal facing data models, and insights for customer-facing data models). The company also applies these design principles to achieve flexible but consistent data modeling in their BI tool. They use pre-joined, modeled marts tables to answer most queries and allow power users the ability to go beyond that. They avoid surfacing intermediate tables in their BI tool and do not "over model" their marts models. Additionally, they do not allow staging tables to become part of these pre-joined datasets in their BI tool or save custom columns there. This approach helps them maintain consistency while providing flexibility.

In this interview with Anna Hosey, Office & People Coordinator at incident.io, she shares her favorite memory of joining the company and rushing to Amsterdam to deliver swag for a team event. She highlights the value "Make it magic" as one that resonates with her, emphasizing small gestures like handwritten birthday cards or personalized snacks. Anna's favorite benefit is ClassPass, which allows her to relax after work through various activities. Her favorite Slack channel is #daylist-daily, where she enjoys learning about colleagues' music preferences. Anna advises candidates interviewing with incident.io to understand their work values and ensure alignment with the company's culture. She describes the company culture as vibrant, thoughtful, and goofy. Anna would like to be stuck in a lift with Maddie Mulholland due to her problem-solving skills during emergencies. Anna is looking forward to expanding the company's unique culture as it grows. She appreciates being part of the People team at incident.io, where she feels supported and trusted by colleagues. One project that stands out for Anna is the London office move, which involved extensive planning and coordination but resulted in a beautiful new workspace for her team.

Incident.io has maintained a consistent weekly update for customers since its inception, with over 200 updates published in four years. The company emphasizes the importance of this habit and how it reflects on their commitment to delivering value to customers. They follow three principles when writing changelogs: consistency (writing an update every week), human touch (avoiding automation), and focusing on last week's progress only. To keep the process light, they use Notion for drafting updates and a single Slack channel for internal communication. The changelog is tracked in a spreadsheet to monitor growth and performance. They also engage with customers by sharing changelogs in their Slack channels and tagging them against issues in Linear, ensuring seamless communication between product and commercial teams.

Tracing is an essential tool for observability and debugging applications. It involves capturing the route that a request takes through an application, represented by traces made up of spans. Each span represents a unit of work with attributes such as ID, name, start and end time, and links to its parent span's ID. Tracing can help identify inefficiencies, understand the order of events, and spot slow parts within applications. Using tools like OpenTelemetry, developers can add custom spans from within their codebase for better visibility into application behavior. Incorporating tracing with logging and error reporting provides a comprehensive understanding of system performance and helps engineers quickly identify and fix issues.