The Importance of Empathy in the Workplace

Sonia Gupta is a developer advocate for InfluxDays. Combining her prior experience as a lawyer and her education in web development from the Turing School of Software and Design, Sonia Gupta advocates for the needs of the software developers on her team to ensure product success.

On an episode of the Developer on Fire podcast, Sonia Gupta discussed the importance of cultivating empathy in engineering teams and in life. Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s feelings and experience. Empathy is an important value in the workplace because it helps nurture relationships and demonstrate compassion for others. Exhibiting empathy in the workplace can improve work conditions by fostering better employee interaction, productive communication, higher morale, and more.

When employees apply empathy in their daily interactions, it can promote a better team dynamic. Employees can work more productively, be in alignment with management's priorities, and understand a customer’s pain points, which drives sales and promotes returning clients.

InfluxDB 2.0 & Flux Integration

Software developer Sonia Gupta has a legal background, formerly serving as a public defender, prosecutor, and later as an assistant attorney general involved in torts and civil rights litigation. In her technology career, she worked at several companies, most recently as a developer advocate at InfluxData. Sonia has spoken at numerous tech events including InfluxDays New York City 2019.

InfluxDays events enable participants to gain firsthand knowledge, insights, and inspiration from InfluxDB community members in order to better build and optimize DevOps infrastructure and application monitoring, Internet of Things applications, and real-time analytics to maximize business value. At the 2019 NYC conference, Sonia presented “Introduction to InfluxDB 2.0 & Your First Flux Query.” Her talk covered topics such as running InfluxDB 2.0, using Flux in the 2.0 UI and in Chronograf with 1.7, and building a basic flux query.

She defined InfluxDB as a modern time series database that was designed to accommodate high write and query loads. In addition, InfluxDB includes Flux for data interaction and is a custom high performance data store built to work with time-stamped data. Flux is a functional data scripting and query language which is easy to learn and enables developers to read more code than write. The motivation for developing Flux and InfluxDB 2.0 was the need to add feature requests/functionality lacking in InfluxQL.

New features of InfluxDB 2.0 include an improved user interface with a visual query builder and ability to schedule flux queries. In addition, users can switch between visualizations using a dropdown menu as opposed to visiting a separate page. InfluxDB 2.0 also has tokens that allow access to third party systems to read or write data from the system. 

New Features in InfluxDB 2.0

As a developer advocate, Sonia Gupta has legal and software development experience. She has served as a platform engineer at multiple tech companies, including Tokken and Ibotta. More recently, Sonia Gupta joined InfluxData where she conducted webinars and video tutorials. She also ran a demo session at the InfluxDays London conference in 2019.

InfluxDays is an annual event addressing the importance of time series data and its incorporation in databases to optimize software infrastructure. InfluxDB 2.0 was introduced at the 2019 InfluxDays event held in London. Created by InfluxData, InfluxDB 2.0 is a time series platform designed to monitor heavy loads of data more efficiently.

New features in InfluxDB 2.0 include tokens which enable third party systems to access data easily, a Telegraf agent configuration embedded within the user interface, and scheduled queries or tasks. Additionally, a single binary is utilized to improve the user experience without the need for external software. Flux, a query engine and data scripting language, is now an available alternative to InfluxQL, providing additional functions such as covariance and histograms.