Mark Newell
Engineering Manager, Support Engineering, Chromatic
Managed DeAndre
DeAndre has deeply impacted the Support team and how we work with customers. He is thorough, remarkably efficient, and has a strong, persistent eye for detail.
I’m a senior support engineer with more than 10 years of experience in SaaS, developer tools, and infrastructure.
At Chromatic, I support priority enterprise customers exclusively, working alongside our Solutions Engineers through Slack, email, chat, and video.
I enjoy figuring out why something isn’t working and helping someone understand what to do next. When I don’t know the answer, I acknowledge that and put in the work to find it, whether through documentation or reading and changing code.
I also work on the systems the team relies on. At Chromatic, I led our move from Intercom to Plain and built a Go administration tool for Support and Solutions Engineering.
GitHub activity
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Latest
Earlier
MagicBell, Inc.
Founding Support Engineer
2022
DNSimple Corp.
Technical Support Specialist
2020–2022
GitLab, Inc.
Support Engineer
2018–2020
SurveyGizmo
Technical Support Team Lead
2017–2018
Customer.io
Technical Support Specialist
2016
Groupon, Inc.
Onboarding Specialist, Travel
2013–2016
Customer Support Specialist, Travel
2012–2013
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I’ve been impressed with his ability to operate at multiple levels: he’s been instrumental in forming process, tooling and handling the day-to-day interactions.
He makes it a point to contribute to any and all discussions that drive our department forward, ensures that any ticket he touches receives expert service, and is always looking to expand his knowledge and that of his team.
How I work
Debugging and escalation
I start by reproducing the problem and working out where it comes from, following it through APIs, databases, DNS, networking, or CI pipelines as needed. My experience covers hosted and self-managed products, phone support, and incident response.
From cases to product fixes
When an issue keeps coming back, I work with Engineering and Product to address the cause. At GitLab, I contributed product fixes and built a workflow that turned customer feedback into issues the team could follow up on.
Documentation
Once I’ve worked something out, I document it so the next person can use it. That includes customer troubleshooting guides and internal guidance that stays current as we learn from cases.
Tools for support teams
I’ve contributed ChatOps and Slack-bot commands at GitLab and built shared investigation workflows at Chromatic, including one for explaining changes in customer usage. Where I use AI, personal information is protected, destructive actions require confirmation, and an engineer reviews customer replies.
Tools and technical experience
Support operations
I’ve migrated and administered support platforms and worked on routing, ticket taxonomies, QA, escalations, and incident communication, using support data to guide changes. Plain Intercom Zendesk HelpScout
Product and developer tools
I debug frontend and developer environments and work with browser testing, integration testing, source control, and CI/CD. JavaScript TypeScript React Next.js HTML CSS Storybook Chromatic Playwright Cypress GitHub GitLab
Internal tools, APIs, and data
I work with APIs and databases to build CLIs, MCP servers, and workflow automations for support teams. Go Ruby Ruby on Rails Bash REST APIs GraphQL PostgreSQL MongoDB
Infrastructure and identity
My technical experience includes cloud infrastructure, containers, Linux, networking, observability, authentication, and account access. AWS GCP Kubernetes Docker Serverless Linux DNS Routing TCP/IP VPNs Firewalls OAuth2 OIDC SAML Azure Active Directory
Knowledge and AI-assisted workflows
I build workflows that help engineers investigate a case, understand the diagnosis, and make what they’ve learned available to others.