01 · 2024pgtrace
- Problem
- Author & maintainer
- What I did
- A terminal tool that watches Postgres for slow queries and suggests the index that would fix them. 4.1k stars; used in production at a few hundred companies.
Result
Open source
Open to staff and principal roles from January
Ines Okafor
Staff Software Engineer · Lisbon, Portugal
I make slow systems fast and confusing ones obvious, mostly in Postgres, Go and TypeScript.
ines@portfolio: ~
Command:whoami
Ines Okafor
Staff Software Engineer · Lisbon, Portugal
Command:ls skills
Go TypeScript PostgreSQL Kafka Kubernetes Terraform React Distributed systems Observability Incident response
Command:cat now.txt
I make slow systems fast and confusing ones obvious, mostly in Postgres, Go and TypeScript.
Case studies
Problems I’ve solved
01 · 2024
02 · Northwind Pay · 2023Ledgerline
- Problem
- Tech lead
- What I did
- Rebuilt the cash-position service behind a treasury dashboard. Reports that took 40 seconds now load in under one, on a third of the hardware.
Result
Product
03 · City of Porto · 2021Transit Live
- Problem
- Engineer
- What I did
- Real-time arrivals for 380 bus stops, built with a team of four in ten weeks and still running on the original architecture.
Result
Civic
Roadmap so far
2014 – 2018
Software Engineer
Porto Digital · Porto
Public-sector web services, from parking permits to the city’s open-data portal.
2018 – 2022
Senior Engineer
Talo · Berlin
Built the multi-tenant data layer and the on-call practice that took incidents from weekly to quarterly.
2022 – PresentNow
Staff Software Engineer
Northwind Pay · Lisbon
Lead the platform group: payments ledger, event streaming and the internal developer portal. Cut p95 settlement latency from 2.3s to 180ms.
How I work
I’ve spent eleven years on the unglamorous middle of software: the queue that backs up at 9am, the query that worked fine until the table hit forty million rows, the deploy nobody wants to run on Fridays.
Lately I lead platform work at a payments company, write about database internals, and maintain pgtrace, a small tool that has saved a surprising number of on-call weekends.
Toolkit
GoTypeScriptPostgreSQLKafkaKubernetesTerraformReactDistributed systemsObservabilityIncident response
“Ines is the person you want in the room when the graph goes vertical. Calm, fast, and she writes it all down afterwards.”
“She made our on-call boring, which is the nicest thing anyone has done for this team.”
Education
MSc Informatics Engineering
University of Porto · 2009–2014
2024
Indexes you forgot you needed
Talk, PGConf EU
2023
The boring guide to on-call
Essay, 38k readers
2024
pgtrace reaches 4,000 stars
Open source
2022
Speaker, GopherCon Lisbon
Talk