Alex Barksdale
Senior Software Engineer at Datadog
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Barksdale is a Senior Software Engineer in New York with six years of experience building backend systems and developer-facing products that prioritize real customer value. At Datadog he incubated and now leads LLM Observability work—shipping real-time tracing and A/B testing tools for models—and has deep domain expertise in database monitoring, restoring Postgres explain-plan support and adding SQL Server AlwaysOn and Postgres 13 capabilities across the fleet. An active contributor to Datadog’s open-source repos, he’s improved SQL obfuscation and database integrations to enhance privacy and performance telemetry. Pragmatic and product-focused, he combines hands-on backend and DBA skills with an appetite for turning hard operational problems into usable features.
6 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Applied Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Applied Computer Science at Dominican University of CaliforniaHigh School Diploma, High School Diploma at Timber Creek High School
English
Stackoverflow
161reputation
49kreached
3answers
1question
Github Skills (20)
observability10
postgresql10
mysql10
databases10
database-administration10
go10
sql10
database10
python9
apm-agent9
opentelemetry8
opentelemetry-go8
dockers7
docker7
generics6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
DataDog/datadog-agent
Jun 2021 - Jan 2023
Main repository for Datadog Agent
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:57 reviews, 34 commits, 18 PRs in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily focused on enhancing the SQL obfuscation capabilities within the Datadog agent. Their work involved adding support for various SQL database features, including the ability to collect SQL commands and comments. They also improved the obfuscation process by adding options to replace digits and handle temporary tables in SQL Server queries. These changes contribute to improved data privacy and security, and enhance agent functionality.
golangdatadog-agentagentobservabilitypmm
DataDog/integrations-core
May 2021 - Jan 2023
Core integrations of the Datadog Agent
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Database Engineer/Administrator
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer/AdministratorContributions:131 reviews, 164 commits, 164 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily contributed to the implementation of Postgres 13 support for statement metrics, which involved adding new metrics based on the database version and creating a "disallow" list. They also provided the ability to provide a reason for not having an execution plan. In addition, the user worked on providing MySQL and Postgres no explain plan reasons, as well as the ability to set a reported hostname. These contributions centered around improving the Datadog Agent's integration with both Postgres and MySQL databases, particularly focusing on performance monitoring and execution plan analysis.
datadog-agentagentintegrationsmonitoringdatadog
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