Yet another week of doing lots … but not necessarily the things I was tasked with. Plus it was my turn to be fire-fighter, which always means a lot of ad-hoc distractions.
While I did some coding, a great deal of time was taken up investigating data issues form our customers. The amazing ability of Dremel to query enormous datasets in realtime is a real bonus. But understanding the meaning behind the results can take a lot of time. One customer was complaining about seeing a huge jump in the number of changes to their project at a certain point earlier this year. I was able to track that down to a misconfiguration that they corrected at that time. For a moment, I was worried that I’d lost data for them!
Another customer was investigating how far back in time our dataset went. Looking at some strange results there revealed a bug in how our pipeline considered some jobs to be “in production”. This was simple to fix, but it required a sequence of three chained changes, each depending on deployment of the predecessor.
Probably the most important part of the week was a meeting with our new director to go over the metrics work we do. Lots of probing questions were asked (which is good!) that made us realise we needed to better understand who’s using the metrics we produce, and why they’re helpful. This is something that it’s easy to lose sight of when you’ve been building for a very long time.
Stats: 30 changes submitted, 53 reviewed
Jabbering Giraffe 