Richard Crowley
Engineer at PlanetScale
Richard is an engineer, engineering leader, and recovering manager. His work focuses on cloud infrastructure, tooling, databases, and distributed systems. He is an engineer at PlanetScale. Prior to joining PlanetScale he founded a consulting practice called Source & Binary and led operations engineering at Slack. He tolerates computers, likes bicycles, isn't a very good open-source maintainer, and lives in San Francisco with his wife and two kids.
Upcoming presentations
We are all the 99th percentile
How 99th percentile latency can add up to a bad experience for everyone
When delivering software via the Web, we monitor 99th percentile latency, often without thinking about exactly what it means. Informally, it's almost the slowest experience anyone has using our product. It's (close to) the "worst-case scenario." Too often, we use these informal definitions to excuse our 99th percentile latency. We take comfort in our median latency, which is certainly lower a...
When a spreadsheet won't cut the mustard
Lessons learned reimagining a SaaS pricing spreadsheet as a Postgres database
Spreadsheets are everywhere, from shoestring budgets and vacation itineraries to complex models driving global financial markets. Spreadsheets are there when your typical startup sets its prices, too. It starts out simple - a list of things you sell and how much you charge. Inevitably you'll add additional paid features, separate fixed and variable costs, expand to other countries or currencies...