Tag Archive for performance

Week 11 – Back to Baselines

My internship at Wizards is winding down, with just one more week to go. Hard to believe the summer has flown by so fast!

This week, I worked with Hazera (fellow performance engineer) to create some new baseline analytics for our load testing. The baseline is basically a load scenario which represents a typical day of virtual traffic for all of our web applications, which gives us a constant to run comparison runs against. I found myself grateful that I’d just taken a Statistics class, as that is what a lot of this boils down to.

I also did some troubleshooting for a web test plugin we use in our automation which extracts strings from our test email inbox. It wasn’t cleaning up after itself property, causing the inbox to periodically fill up. I ended up doing a little IMAP programming in C#, and I ended up additionally creating a load test plugin to clear the mailbox as needed. I was surprised at how easy the built-in C# classes make this.

One of the applications I’ve been helping do the performance testing on is called Planeswalker Points, and they had a major new feature release launch this week which went very smoothly. I couldn’t be prouder of the team!

This week marked my supervisor’s birthday. He is a big fan of Batman, so we literally covered his cube in Batman decorations and brought in a heap of desserts.

Next week, I’ll be going through my exit paperwork & interview, and doing my best to dump all that I’ve learned into documentation to help the next batch of interns along.