Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Mon, 23 Sep 2024
Paul Zaich from Checkr tells us about a critical outage that occurred, what caused it and how they tracked down and fixed the issue. The conversation ranges through troubleshooting complex systems, building team culture, blameless post-mortems, and monitoring the right things to make sure your applications don't fail or alert you when they do.LinksPaul's TwitterPaul's LinkedInPicksBlood Pressure Monitor - Daveeft - LukeRuby one-liners cookbook - PaulPodcast Growth Summit - ChuckMost Valuable Dev - ChuckMost Valuable Dev Summit - ChuckMushroom Wars - ChuckGmelius - ChuckBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ruby-rogues--6102073/support.
Full Episode
Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast. This week on our panel, we have Luke Stutters. Hello. We have Dave Kimura. Hey, everyone. I'm Charles Maxwood from devchat.tv. Quick shout out about mostvaluable.dev. Go check it out. We have a special guest this week, and that is Paul Zeich.
Zeich. Well done. Thank you.
Now, you're here from Checkr. You gave a talk at RailsConf about how you broke stuff or somebody broke stuff. Do you want to just kind of give us a quick intro to who you are and what you do? And then we'll dive in and talk about what broke and how you figured it out?
Sure. So I've been a software engineer for about 10 years. Recently in the last year or so, transitioned into an engineering management role. But I've worked at a number of different Small startups.
I joined Checkr in 2017 when the company was at about 100 employees, 30 engineers, contributed as an engineer for a couple of years to our team, and then have recently transitioned, like I said, into an engineering management role.
at the company. Very cool. I actually have a Checkr t-shirt in my closet that I never wear. It's Checkr for those that are listening and not reading it. Yeah. So why don't you kind of tee us up for this as far as, yeah, what happened? What broke? Yeah. Give us a preliminary timeline and explain what Checkr does and why that matters.
Sure. So Checkr was founded in 2014. Daniel and Jonathan are founders. I had worked in the on-demand space, another company, and had discovered that it was very difficult to integrate background checks into their onboarding process.
Background checks tend to be a very important final safety step for a lot of these companies to make sure that their platform is going to be safe and secure for customers. their customers. And so in 2014, they started an automated background check company.
And initially, the biggest selling point was that Checkr abstracted away a lot of the complexity of background check process, collecting candidate information, and then executing that flow and exposing that via an API that was developed in a Sinatra app. And three years later, in 2017, I just joined about four or five months before this particular incident happened.
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