Many hyper-growth startups hit a point where the current systems just aren’t enough.
Racing toward product–market fit, they skip best practices around observability, monitoring, and alerting—and pay for it later.
This talk is about going from 0 → 1 and protecting your company, team, and customers when the pressure mounts.
I’ll cover:
Getting started from the ground floor
Foundational work, the three pillars of observability, and—more importantly—how to get hands-on with all three.
This won’t be another high-level “logs/traces/metrics” sermon; we’ll actually use them.
Building your first monitor, alert, and dashboard
Move to offense: catch full outages, errors, latency spikes, and change alerts before your customers do.
We’ll touch more than just the “golden signals.”
Iterating
Going from 0 → 1 is only the beginning. You’ll need to tune false alarms, coach engineers on response, add new metrics, and prune stale ones—plenty of hidden gotchas here.
Teams often get bogged down by dogma and decision paralysis.
I’ll share tactics for keeping a bias toward action and steadily moving the reliability needle.
No sales pitch. I may demo with an APM tool (no affiliations) purely to illustrate what’s possible.
Aditya Bansal is a Staff Engineer at Cortex, an Internal Developer Portal that helps engineering teams catalog their services. He joined as the company’s first employee over four years ago and has since grown into his current Staff Engineer role.
Aditya began his career at Poynt, helping scale the engineering team from 15 to 60+ people. There, he built and maintained much of the company-wide infrastructure and watched the platform make the classic transition from a monolith to microservices.
He later joined Curebase as one of the earliest hires, working directly with the founders to build the engineering organisation from scratch before moving on to Cortex.
