Are you checking your top two transactions?

Short edition today, because not everything needs to be a ten page essay.

As a senior engineering leader (Senior EM, Director and up) you want to have automated quality controls in place. SLOs help a lot. But the reality of many companies is that those controls don’t exist or are insufficient.

The quest to roll out SLOs and automated quality controls is a long arduous one at best. Assuming we have some kind of APM (like Newrelic, Datadog, a self-hosted ELK Stack, etc), one high leverage thing we can do in the meantime is to look at the places where most of our code time is spent.

Most software services have one or two transactions that take up most of the time. It pays to periodically have a close look at them, and ask questions to the maintainers about their performance. Often times, it opens the way to architecture conversations that, due to the outsized impact on overall performance, can move the needle for the company - either in costs or customer experience.

Worst case scenario, we don’t find anything that needs improvement but we learned more about what our teams are building. It’s never a waste of time.

That’s it, that’s the Friday Tip.

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!