March 2020 Summaries

In response to the coronavirus outbreak and the shift to remote work, Rollbar successfully transitioned its entire recruiting process to a remote format within two days, focusing on maintaining a positive candidate and interviewer experience. Initially, the company identified gaps in their existing processes, which were primarily designed for in-person interactions, including issues related to candidate instructions, team communication, and technology tools. To address these, Rollbar updated candidate and interviewer guidelines, implemented Zoom and Slack for communication, and integrated Coderpad for coding interviews. The company also emphasized smooth transitions and candidate comfort during interviews by coordinating schedules and allowing breaks. Despite the rapid shift, Rollbar completed five interview panels for four roles in the first week, resulting in two job offers, one of which was accepted. Rollbar continues to refine its virtual interview process, aiming to hire the best talent globally while adapting to the ongoing pandemic situation.

Rollbar's blog series discusses their use of Kafka to modernize their data ingestion architecture by replacing legacy components. The first post explains how their existing system processes event payloads through an API, writing them to disk for batch insertion into databases, which poses scalability and future growth challenges. Rollbar evaluates Kafka, alongside Cloud Pub/Sub, to streamline this process and integrate with Kubernetes, opting for Kafka due to its mature ecosystem and suitability for their processing model. Kafka allows for flexible data retention, parallel data processing, and ease of scaling, with the blog detailing considerations for Kafka cluster sizing, partitioning, and broker configuration to accommodate their ingestion throughput requirements. Rollbar chose the node-rdkafka library for their Node.js API to ensure efficient message publication, emphasizing the importance of configuring broker and producer settings to meet performance and reliability goals. The post concludes by highlighting Kafka's manageability, provided configurations are carefully tailored to expected traffic and system throughput, and hints at future discussions on consumer logic and system deployment.

Rollbar, founded nearly eight years ago by Cory and Brian, aims to alleviate the challenges developers face in quickly and confidently shipping software by offering an automated error response platform. This platform, known for its proprietary grouping engine, provides developers with comprehensive visibility into errors throughout the software development lifecycle, enabling faster error resolution and more frequent deployments. With over 100,000 developers and 4,500 customers, Rollbar has significantly increased the release velocity of its adopters. Recently, Rollbar announced closing a Series B financing round of $11 million led by Runa Capital, with participation from other investors, and welcomed Dmitry Galperin to its board. The company plans to use the funds to double its team size across various functions and locations, focusing on product development and customer experience improvement.