An interesting part of the hiring process at Lookout is the candidate presentation. The presentation is meant to introduce the individual to the entire company while giving them an opportunity to wax poetic on a topic the person is passionate about.
As part of my interview process, I decided to present my work with Graphite, a real-time scalable “analytics” tool.
I place the word “analytics” in quotes because Graphite itself is really a tool for storing an enormous number of data points in, whether it be “analytics” in the product sense of the word, machine metrics, performance counters, or any other data point that can be recorded and graphed over time.
While at Apture, I deployed and utilized Graphite primarily for performance monitoring and profiling. Within days of it being deployed, I remember Steven turning to me as we looked over some performance numbers saying “what were we doing before?!”
Flying blind, that’s what.
I can’t recommend Graphite highly enough, but at least one should have a similar system in place to give the team some level of feedback about how an application is actually performing in production.
My presentation alone isn’t terribly informative by itself, but has some pretty screenshots and graphs. There are no associated notes with the PDF as I felt comfortable and confident enough discussing Graphite that I ad-libbed my commentary.