Steve Newman, Author at Scalyr

Steve Newman / April 14

1000 Little Breakthroughs

How do you optimize a system by a factor of 100, when you already built it the best you knew how? In recent years, we’ve found ourselves in conversations with potential customers who would love…
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Steve Newman / October 23

Nothing is Wrong, It’s Just Not Working

Troubleshooting a production incident is stressful. But sometimes, you get to the end, give a satisfied sigh, and think: that was a worthwhile puzzle. This is such a tale. It’s also an example of something…
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Steve Newman / April 29

Implementing PowerQueries

When we first built Scalyr, we focused on making it fast and easy to extract answers from logs. Over the years, as we add capabilities, we’ve maintained that focus on simplicity and speed. We based…
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Photo of Christine Heckart, Scalyr's new CEO

Steve Newman / January 17

Introducing Christine Heckart, Scalyr’s new CEO

It seems like just yesterday that I announced that Scalyr had raised Series A. It was a big step for the company. We’ve been pretty capital efficient, so we weren’t short on cash, but the…
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Steve Newman / July 16

Work in Progress

At Scalyr, we’re building a large-scale storage system for timeseries and log data (see Introducing Scalyr Logs). To make good design decisions, we need hard data about EC2 I/O performance. Plenty of data has been published on this…
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Steve Newman / November 20

Building a Sustainable Startup

Although Scalyr has been around since 2011, it feels like we are really just getting started. So many tech startups come roaring out of the gate, pursuing growth at all costs. Sometimes this leads to…
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Steve Newman / July 27

Support Driven Development: Listen now so you don’t hear it later

Here at Scalyr, we’re big fans of Complaint-Driven Development, which I’ll summarize as “focus engineering effort on fixing the things users actually complain about.” We especially focus on issues that generate support requests, with such…
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Steve Newman / September 27

Irreversible Failures: Lessons from the DynamoDB Outage

Summary: Most server problems, once identified, can be quickly solved with a simple compensating action—for instance, rolling back the bad code you just pushed. The worst outages are those where reversing the cause doesn’t undo…
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Steve Newman / April 22

Scalyr Announces $2.1M Seed Round To Reinvent System Visibility

A few years ago, we set out to rebuild server and log monitoring from the ground up. Today marks a new and exciting chapter in the story. To tell it properly, let me take you…
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Steve Newman / April 3

Scalyr is Hiring!

This is a post I’ve been looking forward to writing. We’re entering a new stage at Scalyr, and we’re looking for a few strong engineers — frontend, backend, and devops — to join us as…
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