The Customer Service Survey
Hotshots
Thu - November 8, 2007 01:32 PM in
"Our Employees Are Our Most Valuable Asset" is so cliche that it has collapsed under the gravitational pull of its own clichedom and formed its own parallel universe of cliche.
Cliche or not, whatever success VocaLabs has attained is thanks in large part to the efforts of David Leppik, our VP of Development, and Dan Taylor, our VP of Operations (David also happens to be my brother, but that's a story for another day). David is an amazingly talented developer and software architect who is probably as productive as ten normal programmers, and Dan has done a consistently outstanding job of keeping our infrastructure operating with a high degree of reliability despite very limited resources.
Today we discovered a problem with one of our web pages loading slowly. We'd gotten a couple reports about this over the past couple weeks, but it's often hard to pin down a "page loads slowly" report with all the possible causes (most of which we have no control over). This time, though, we got a detailed enough report to reproduce the problem on our end, and David and Dan swung into action.
Within ten minutes, Dan had isolated the bottleneck on our production server to a particular database query which was taking about a hundred times longer than it should. David recognized the query as one which had changed slightly in a new version of our code deployed about two weeks ago, and the pair determined that the database server wasn't handling the query as efficiently as it should. We should be able to have a fix in place in fairly short order.
Of course fixing one bug isn't going to make or break us, but this is an example of the kind of efficiency and teamwork David and Dan deliver consistently every day. Thanks to them, we've been able to consistently get projects done on time, keep our systems running smoothly, and bugs rarely remain bugs for very long.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Today we discovered a problem with one of our web pages loading slowly. We'd gotten a couple reports about this over the past couple weeks, but it's often hard to pin down a "page loads slowly" report with all the possible causes (most of which we have no control over). This time, though, we got a detailed enough report to reproduce the problem on our end, and David and Dan swung into action.
Within ten minutes, Dan had isolated the bottleneck on our production server to a particular database query which was taking about a hundred times longer than it should. David recognized the query as one which had changed slightly in a new version of our code deployed about two weeks ago, and the pair determined that the database server wasn't handling the query as efficiently as it should. We should be able to have a fix in place in fairly short order.
Of course fixing one bug isn't going to make or break us, but this is an example of the kind of efficiency and teamwork David and Dan deliver consistently every day. Thanks to them, we've been able to consistently get projects done on time, keep our systems running smoothly, and bugs rarely remain bugs for very long.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 01:32 PM | | | | |