Masha Schneider

At Google, I've worked on several teams, but one of my most interesting externally visible projects was a feature in local search on maps. We had an issue with poor result quality due to people adding too many filters when searching for businesses like fine dining in areas with low population density. I worked on relaxing these filtering guidelines to add results for businesses that barely don't meet the criteria. This drastically reduced the number of "no results found" pages.

At Cockroach Labs we always had assumptions about our cloud deployments, and realized that there were really no best practices in terms of either setup or benchmarking of cloud providers, for the type of system we were deploying. We did, however, notice that our product worked better in different setups. I decided to get some clarity and ran a large battery of tests and benchmarks on different configurations on several clouds. Eventually, this became so informative that we published our findings for external consumption.