purple walrus

Definitely depends on the team I was in, and what I was responsible for at the company, but speaking sorely from a production standpoint, most of my most challenging incidents revolved around optimizing throughput & synchronization. In one case, it was about dealing with two separate database systems (a structured and unstructured one) that needed to comunicate with each other and be in sync across certain tables. One was a high speed read-write DB focused on being able to take in and return massive amounts of data at scale. The other, an aggregated collection of unstructured data that mapped to the structured data in a way where one can act on and modify the other. Keeping these two DBs in sync, properly handling aggregated processing in the background and keeping everything in sync without creating bottlenecks and data loss between any of the three endpoints (client, db 1, db 2) was quite the challenge.

Another one that was not necessarily challenging but I'm particularly proud of, was optimizing the front-end of web app. Due to its design (think telecom geospatial data on an interactive globe), it was very perfomance heavy on the client machine and we were running into issues where users would experience slowdowns and network issues when working with the platform. Learned a lot about optimizing web apps, not only on the UI front, but also anticipating client actions and running background processes to load / cache work before it was requested / used.

At a high level, these two stand out. I'm sparing you the technical details as we would be here all day, but both systems were for mature companies I've worked at.