Thread by @betsythemuffin

Today's #RealWorldCode livestream, where we worked to remediate outage-inducing IO overload on a production database, left me surprisingly emotional.

So I'm gonna thread about inclusion, formal & informal dev education, and performance work.

Performance work is, hands-down, the single most impostor-syndrome-inducing area of development work I do. I'm pretty good at remediating perf issues within normal business applications, but it's hard to remember that.

Because of how perf work has traditionally been taught.

Performance work isn't formally taught. It's informally taught, through mentorship networks, often during or because of an incident. Effective performance work traditionally required deep knowledge of monitoring tools & a specific system's idiosyncracies. Hard to get from a book.

Stuff that's "informally taught through mentorship networks" is... a lot more difficult for the only woman on the team to learn than it is for her peers to learn.

It gets worse when we look at what performance work traditionally has looked like.

as @mipsytipsy is fond of pointing out, old-school performance monitoring tools' imprecision meant that diagnosing issues became a matter of intuition and guesswork. From the outside, "intuition and guesswork" looks like an innate quality, rather than a learnable skill.

Because I didn't have access to the mentorship networks that would teach me performance skills, and because those skills have traditionally been a black box, for the longest time I assumed it was just a talent that I didn't have. It was so disempowering.

One thing I'm hoping to do with the #RealWorldCode mini-series on diagnosing performance issues in production Rails applications (oh believe me we're gonna do more) is break down and demystify the actual, data-driven skills of modern performance work.

Today, @zspencer, @jacksonlatka and I correlated information from multiple diagnostic tools (including the business context) to 1. confirm that an intermittent pathological condition was thrashing the database with writes, 2. remediate one portion of that pathological condition.

and there's ultimately no magic to that, there's just, "here's what this tool is telling us, here's how we can combine that with this other information to build a more complete picture, here's how to act now that we have that picture."

I'm really hoping that these livestreams help make performance work more accessible to people like me-five-years-ago, who feel shut out of learning it because they don't have access to the old boys' club.