Strange Loop

Better Integration Tests for Performance Monitoring

In late 2017, Slack's largest customers were plagued with relentless performance-related outages. Our monolithic, spaghetti codebase was increasingly difficult to reason about; small, innocuous changes might accidentally cause a cascade of regressions. A few concerned engineers teamed up to build a tool detecting and preventing these changes from reaching production. Known as "Slerf" (for "Sl"ack P"erf"ormance), the simple system runs atop Slack's existing unit testing framework and alerts backend engineers early to any potential regressions their code might introduce. Learn how you can extend your own testing framework and improve both the confidence of your engineers and stability of your product while maintaining a high development velocity!

Maude Lemaire

Slack

Maude is a staff engineer at Slack Technologies, working to scale both the product and the backend engineering team to support some of the world's largest companies. She spends most of her time chasing down people making network calls in a loop, refactoring unwieldy chunks of code, and tweaking developer tools. Prior to moving to the Bay Area, Maude was a front-end engineer at Rent the Runway in New York City. She earned a BSc. in Software Engineering from McGill University in Montréal, QC. In her spare time, she's an avid baker who enjoys take silly pictures of her husband.