Ship It! Cloud, SRE, Platform Engineering

Abstractions and implementations

Nov 22, 2024

Hazel Weakly, an expert in infrastructure and community building, shares insights on when to create abstractions versus using existing implementations. She highlights the value of psychological safety in tech teams and reflects on her experiences at tech conferences. The discussion touches on the evolution of programming languages and the trade-offs involved in engineering practices. Additionally, they explore the importance of community and open-source tools in fostering collaboration and innovation.

53:14

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Episode guests

Hazel Weakly

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Episode notes

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

Sentry's shift to a trace-connected metrics model reveals the importance of contextual understanding for effective debugging in development.

The discussion highlights the ongoing struggles for respect and equality faced by women in the tech community amidst patriarchal dynamics.

Fostering psychological safety and community building is essential for innovation and personal growth within tech teams and organizations.

Deep dives

The Evolution of Trace Connected Metrics

Sentry has shifted its approach to building metrics systems, moving away from traditional disconnected metric models to a trace-connected model. This change was inspired by user feedback and the realization that disconnected metrics lacked the rich contextual information necessary for debugging complex issues. The new model emphasizes the importance of understanding how metrics relate to the underlying code structure, which enhances the usability and effectiveness of the data collected. This intentional design decision requires developers to invest time in establishing meaningful connections, ultimately leading to greater returns in debugging efficiency and user satisfaction.

Intro

4min

Tech Privilege and Festive Shenanigans

5min

Building Community and Empowering Developers with Open Source Tools

4min

Navigating Abstractions in Platform Engineering

21min

Leveraging Retool for Efficient Application Development

3min

Bridging the Communication Gap

13min

Engaging Farewell and Invitation for Stories

2min

Hazel Weakly joins Justin and Autumn to talk about when to build abstractions and how to implement them. They also share experiences from tech conferences, and delve into the importance of building community and psychological safety in tech environments.

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Sponsors:

Sentry – Code breaks, fix it faster. Use the code CHANGELOG when you sign up to get $100 off the team plan. Don’t just observe. Take action. Sentry is the only app monitoring platform built for developers that gets to the root cause for every issue. 100,000+ growing teams use sentry to find problems fast.
Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai.
Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog

Featuring:

Hazel Weakly – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
Justin Garrison – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
Autumn Nash – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

Interview

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