Observability as a Success Catalyst | Momento’s Co-Founder & CTO Daniela Miao

**Daniela Miao** (0:00)
The iterative development cycle depends on, is often feedback driven. It sort of depends on, well, what's my current product doing? Where are the requests going? Why is my app slow, right? So I think a lot of that feeds back into the continuous, the next cycle of development. So rather than let that opaqueness grow, observability gives you that venue where you can find the slowdowns, you can find performance.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:29)
Developer productivity can make or break whether companies deliver value to their customers. But are you tracking the right metrics that truly make a difference? Understanding the right productivity metrics can be the difference between hitting your goals and falling behind. To highlight how you can adjust your approach to both measure what matters and identify the right corrective strategies, Linear B just released the engineering leaders guide to accelerating developer productivity. Download the guide at the link in the show notes, and take the steps you need to improve your organization's developer productivity today. welcome back to Dev Interrupted, everyone. I'm your host, Conor Bronsdon, and today I am delighted to have an exciting episode with Daniela Miao, co-founder and CTO of Momento, a real-time data infrastructure platform that simplifies architecture at any scale. Daniela has a really impressive background, having helped build DynamoDB at AWS and worked with IBM at their Canada Software Lab before founding Momento. Thanks so much for joining me on Dev Interrupted.

**Daniela Miao** (1:28)
Thanks for having me, Conor. It's super exciting to be here today.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:32)
Yeah, Daniela, I'm excited to tell a bit about your story, talk a bit about your approach as a founder, and dive into the importance of observability with you. A lot of our listeners are founders themselves or thinking about being technical founders in the future. We've done quite a few episodes focused on different leadership skills and the approaches leaders take. But for today's conversation, we really want to take a look at your playbook as a CTO and understand both why you think observability is so crucial, yet often overlooked until it's too late. And I also want to get a sense of for why, Daniela, you are rebuilding Momento's entire stack with Rust, and how you got the buy-in to do so. But before we jump into all that, I do want to remind our listeners, if you enjoy these episodes, I know we ask you every week, but please just take a brief moment to rate and review Dev Interrupted on your podcasting app of choice. Your feedback really helps us to bring you more great conversations with leaders like Daniela. We really appreciate it. It means a lot to us every time we see one of your reviews. But with that said, I want to start off with some congratulations. Daniela, first off, congratulations on your Series A funding.

**Daniela Miao** (2:34)
Thank you. Yeah, we're super excited for what's coming up ahead for us, for our company.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:40)
Yeah, it's got to be a huge milestone and really exciting to have that opportunity to take this next step. I know one of the big things you were thinking about as we first started to talk about having you on the show is, the importance of observability and how you think about it. Why is it that you think observability is often treated as an auxiliary service, and what are the consequences that you see of not prioritizing it from the start when your company is just getting started in that seed pre-seed stage?

**Daniela Miao** (3:07)
A lot of my opinions and my thoughts here have been formed because of my previous experience working four plus years at an observability startup in San francisco called LightStuff.
There, we saw all kinds of customer stories. That's where I saw that a lot of companies, especially the ones startups that are trying to move fast, break things, find product market fit in the shortest timeline. They really focus on building the product. Observing the actual product is usually an afterthought. Once you have the feature ready, you want to push it out and you want to show it to your customers. You want the market to try it out. That's very understandable. However, most of us do not build perfect software the first time around. And then essentially what we've seen is when issues occur, there's just a lack of visibility into what's going on at all. And then essentially the developers are flying blind at that point. And you really want these things to not happen when you hit that growth curve, when your product becomes successful. Now, unfortunately, usually issues occur when you become popular. So we've seen a lot of customers kind of rushing in to say, oh, we're really struggling. What's the fastest way to get observability in our stack? And then unfortunately, again, it's something that you have to invest in over time. And it's really not a whole lot of shortcuts.