The Spring 2014 class of Hackbright Academy engineering fellows visited New Relic's San Francisco office on Thursday for a field trip.

We enjoyed the coffee bar at the New Relic office on the 10th floor, which has a glorious view of the Bay Bridge and Port of Oakland's container cranes across the San Francisco bay.

We were welcomed by New Relic software engineer Katherine Wu from the Portland office, who is a Hackbright alum. She talked about the APM product at New Relic, the engineering challenges and process at New Relic.

Next, New Relic engineers led smaller groups of Hackbright Academy engineering fellows through a New Relic exercise -- teams focused on getting New Relic installed, getting the app up and running, and showing how activity on the app reports back to New Relic. This included noting any errors that are generated (for example, negative numbers as inputs to the factorial function in Kata 3).

Thanks to Kelsey Yocum on the business enablement team, Mariane Abou-Jaoudé, Shiv Kumar and Zoe Kay from the business enablement team, and Katherine Wu and Katie Miller from the app performance monitoring team for running the Hackbright fellows through the New Relic exercise!

After the exercise, the New Relic engineers gathered for a moderated panel discussion onstage. Joining were Belinda Runkle (engineering manager, agents team), Natasha Litt (director, business enablement team) and Margaret Le (engineering manager, business enablement team) who spoke candidly about the opportunities and challenges for Hackbright Academy engineering fellows.

Thanks to New Relic for hosting the Hackbright Academy class for spring 2014! We enjoyed lunch, "data nerd" t-shirts and great connections and conversations with New Relic engineers! Looking forward to seeing New Relic at Career Day!