Rerun: Hypercare Roundtable With the NY Times Election Response Team

Posted on Tuesday, Oct 5, 2021
Curious about how new organizations were able to maintain their uptime during a news cycle as intense as what turned into Election Week 2020? In this episode Quintessence discusses hypercare preparedness that was put into place at The New York Times with three senior members of their Election Readiness effort - Megan Araula, Lead Software Engineer & Election Readiness Tech Lead, Alexandra Shaheen, Program Manager & Election Readiness Program Lead, and Vinessa Wan, Technical Product Manager, Election Readiness Emeritus.
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Show Notes

For a full transcript of this episode, click the “Display Transcript” button above.

We’re rerunning some episodes in October. Since the holidays are coming up and retail companies will be getting ready for that important time of their year, we wanted to rerun this episode on hypercare featuring the New York Times Election Reponse Team. We’ll be back in November with new episodes!

Additional Resources

Guests

Megan Araula

Megan Araula

Megan is a lead software engineer at The New York Times. She enjoys solving a variety of business problems across multiple teams and missions while also advocating for system resilience and maturity. On her spare time she likes collecting plants and hitting up the slopes to snowboard.

Alexandra Shaheen

Alexandra Shaheen

Alexandra Shaheen started in non-profit administration, but dove right into the systems used to manage the grant-making process. She realized a love for the realm of engineering and seeing requirements result in tangible systems that make important work easier.

Alexandra joined The New York Times in 2018 as a program manager for the team responsible for building and rolling out a new article editor for The Times. After the article editor’s successful rollout in late 2019, Alexandra started as program lead on the election readiness project. She managed the assessments of critical systems, ran stress tests throughout the year, led resilience projects to fortify workflows with single points of failure, and created event preparation requirements for all of technology. She considers this to have been her dream project.

Vinessa Wan

Vinessa Wan

Vinessa is a technical product manager at NYT. She love to apply design principles to developer tooling and resilience engineering concepts to her daily life.
You can check out her essays in the upcoming O’Reilly book, 97 Things Every SRE Should Know (https://97things.incidentlabs.io/). When she’s away from her keyboard, you can find her building lego castles with her daughter.

Hosts

Quintessence Anx

Quintessence Anx

Quintessence is a Developer/DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, where she brings over a decade of experience breaking and fixing things in IT. At PagerDuty, she uses her cloud engineering background to focus on the cultural transformation, tooling, and best practices for DevOps. Outside of work, she mentors underrepresented groups to help them start sustainable careers in technology. She also has a cat and an aquarium with two maroon clown fish and a mantis shrimp, of The Oatmeal fame.