In motor racing, race engineers sit trackside with headsets on, their eyes glued to telemetry dashboards that display brake temperatures, tire degradation, and fuel mix. They don't drive the car, but they ensure it runs at peak performance.
Software has a similar role with SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) & DevOps engineers. Services like Grafana Faro serve as our pit wall dashboards, providing real-time insights into a user’s experience.
The user session represents the drive, and the application is the vehicle. Frontend web vitals like TTFB (Time to First Byte), FCP (First Contentful Paint), and other metrics are akin to lap times. Slow route transitions or broken UX feel like understeer.
As a design engineer, instrumentation is part of my craft in making software. The focus is about delivering exceptional user experiences that resonate with the viewer. This means telemetry and frontend observability—it is integral to good design. We should measure not only how the interface looks but also how it performs under load, how it recovers from errors, and how fast it feels.
It’s not about chasing numbers but designing for real-world conditions. Taste and intuition are important, but runtime data adds rigour, reliability, usability, and a humane touch.
Design shouldn’t fail when the system does; that’s when people need it the most.