Pathpoint makes quoting and binding E&S insurance quicker and easier than ever before. Everyone on our team is working towards this goal, but different roles work towards it differently.
Each engineering team works to make the user experience as fast as possible -- load and response time is a feature that they work to improve.
The engineering team regularly uses performance metrics and Datadog to determine the slowest loading pieces of our software. This is important because there are a finite amount of resources that can be spent on load time, so when one feature takes up a lot of time, it makes other features load slowly as well. The slowest thing makes everything else slower.
Recently, our Activity feed (which captures all the events related to a submission:documents uploaded, new quotes, declinations, bind orders, and so on.). On average the Activity feed took 7 seconds to load for each submission.
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To solve this problem, two of our software engineers, Carl Peaslee and Harman Bains rewrote our Activity feed code.
Since shipping the refactor load times have gone down 96%. The Activity feed now loads in 0.5s on average for all submissions. We also saw average load times decrease by almost a second across the board. In addition, because the improved code frees up resources, there have been less errors captured by our monitoring tools. System health metrics show that users are getting the data they need faster for everything across the board.
Especially exciting is the fact that this is Harman’s first project since he joined Pathpoint. On this, Carl said “It’s something we knew we had to do for 2 years and wanted to do, it’s not easy, and Harman took it on and got it done!”
