A Feat or A Failure
Coming together as a team near the end of last year, we ran through what feels like hundreds of topics trying to find one real world problem we as developers could solve. As a team our deep interests manifested in front end frameworks, but the more research we did, back-end technologies drew us in just like samples at Costco. From Docker to gRPC then to protobuffers, we left no stone or should I say endpoint unvisited. Finally our descent into the deep knowledgeable web brought us to the trendiest database system out there. I would like to present to you our findings on the NoSQL database called Redis. We were soon excited to understand and work with this new and challenging technology..
We enlisted in creating an open source analytics tool to measure the performance of Redis databases. In short, you would connect your Redis instance to our application called RedisRate and it would provide you with server health related information such as overall Memory Usage, Latency and Throughput. This would particularly help those front-end engineers who are not familiar with back-end systems. With a simple GUI, it is much easier for developers to monitor and easily understand key performance metrics.
Constructing a schedule, outlining and making a lot of plans helped contribute to our overall success in building this tool. Running is not my forte, but fast paced sprints, which were short periods of times where we went out and either compiled information or set out small tasks to accomplish, were definitely our strong suit. We would always come back even more excited to teach each other the things we learned and what all we accomplished. Within these sprints we did a good portion of our work. Outlining our successes and where we faced most of our difficulties helped us acknowledge what tasks may need to be broken up even more. Understanding when to pivot and move on to another task kept us level headed and stopped us from spending too much time on dead ends.
But wait there’s more, how were we able to accomplish all of this, on boarding a brand new technology in under a month and then being able to create a tool built around it? Are we just rocket scientists or did the commitment to one another’s understanding and growth really make it all possible? That is a great question! Now let us answer it for you.
This process was fun, challenging, and at times, intimidating. When taking on such a feat it is all reliant on the foundation of a team. Benjamin Franklin once said, “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” This belief has really propelled us forward as individuals and overall as a team. When one member seemed to be missing some information we helped guide each other toward the big picture. When another member had strengths in other areas, they were more than willing to take the time to help explain to the other engineers. Creating a space where communication and innovation was always on the table allowed us to overcome any obstacles with precision and a deeper understanding of all technologies that we used to build our application.
To end it all, Henry Ford once stated, “If everyone is moving forward together then success takes care of itself.” Truer words may never have been spoken. Being a part of and allowing yourself to lean on each other really allowed our success as a team and RedisRate to be born.
We’d like to thank OSLabs for giving us an opportunity for this collaboration.
For more information in our application please visit:
