meet the beeple: mary karroqe

The team here at beeps has come a long way in reimagining on-call. Our goal of creating a modern on-call platform wouldn’t be possible without the amazing engineers that are working behind the scenes to perfect our product.  While our mission is underway, we wanted to take some time to highlight the individuals that are building beeps from the ground up.

Introducing Mary:

Hello, hello! 👋 My name is Mary Karroqe, and I’m a software engineer at beeps. I’m a native New Yorker, proudly from Queens, the most multilingual county in the world. I love learning about new cultures through language and food, whether that’s at home or while traveling. While over 800 different languages are spoken in the city, I can only speak two: English and Albanian. I’ve been working on my Spanish though! 

What’s your prediction for the future of on-call?

Being called on while on-call will always be a demanding job, especially as more and more aspects of everyday life grow dependent on technology. The CrowdStrike outage– which grounded planes, delayed surgeries, and stalled banking– was a stark reminder that the responsibility of an incident responder is much greater than just saving shareholder dollars. It’s to keep our interconnected world running.

The future of on-call is higher stakes. Teams will prioritize investing in reliable, integrated tools to support on-call engineers, rather than allowing that tool to be the first thing on the chopping block when budgets shrink. 

Those tools, like what we’re building at beeps, will free devs from the tedious aspects of being on an on-call team: negotiating with teammates about changing shifts, spending more time identifying issues than solving them, writing postmortems. 

Instead, they’ll empower us to act decisively and confidently when chaos inevitably unfolds.

What challenges are your peers facing in this field?

We’re software engineers. All day, when we code, we problem solve. It’s one thing to stew on a problem in the flow of your everyday routine, with the freedom to iterate creatively. When you’re called on as an incident responder, however, you have to problem-solve in undesirable conditions: it could be the middle of the night, code you may have never seen might be affected, and the clock is ticking. There’s no room for perfection when patching an incident: only for the fastest solution. And sometimes, that means accepting an inelegant fix that you’ll polish later. 

Finding that delicate balance between long-term optimization and immediate action is a distinguishing characteristic of an experienced engineer. While speed is often the first priority when responding to incidents, it’s important that things aren’t lost in the stress of the moment. Traditionally, the postmortem is where teams capture possible causes, ways to refine the initial solution, and ways to prevent the incident from recurring. However, engineers at all levels struggle to find time to write and read these reports. We consider this an integral part of on-call here at beeps, and are thinking up ways to make this easier for our peers– stay tuned!

Why beeps?

Before joining beeps, and before becoming a software engineer, I worked as a technical consultant. I experienced first-hand the challenges of being on-call, and the frustration of existing tools adding stress to engineers instead of taking it away. 

When I was added to my first on-call rotation, I had to scroll through every date I wasn’t on-call in order to find the dates I was. And when I was actually scheduled, our alerting wasn’t well-integrated into our scheduling tool, so a lot of our workflow included manually refreshing dashboards. I couldn’t believe that a better tool for engineers didn’t exist. Time and time again, I’d encounter teams that begrudgingly accepted that frustration as normal.

When I was looking for a new role, it was important to me that I was building something that resonated with me, and solved a problem I empathized with. I definitely had some strong feelings about the times I was on-call!

Are you more of a dog-person or cat-person? Or both?

Despite beeps being the first company I’ve worked at where I’ve been out-numbered by cat-people, my love for big dogs has not swayed! 😅I’m looking forward to the day I move out of my studio apartment into a space with a backyard (a lofty goal for New York City) where a standard poodle can frolic. 

(src: @pupu_to_maru)

If you weren’t an engineer, what career path would you have pursued?

Mentorship has played a huge role in my tech journey. My first “Hello, world!” was printed out in a conference room of 20 high school girls at Girls Who Code, where community, sisterhood, and supporting one-another was at the center of our coding lessons. We were encouraged to pay attention to our peers, and fill each other's gaps when we noticed someone else struggling. 

It was one of the first times I felt safe enough in a classroom environment to unapologetically learn, and be comfortable with “failing.” It’s part of the learning process, after all!

If I wasn’t an engineer– or maybe even when my engineering chapter is over– it would be a privilege to give back and foster positive learning environments for the next generation of students as a teacher. 

:-)