As first engineer, I've been at Olark for a while (three years this March!), and support has been one of my roles since the beginning. When it was just the five of us (and the odd intern here and there), that just made sense--nobody wanted to burn out on our support volume. It helps that all of us were, to some degree, "people who like people," but as time went on and the team grew and grew, it stopped being something we had to do, and started being a part of our culture.

Hey there, guys! Aaron Wilson here, the ever-present but ever-invisible Olark Ruby Ninja Warrior. I'm coming out of the shadows to tell you a little bit about our fun journey with database backups.

TL; DR: Browser encoding can change from one request to the next. When you set content-type, be sure to also specify a charset. Being in the US, that great, wide birthplace of the Internet, it's very easy to take encoding for granted. Anyone who's not a web developer can happily inhabit ASCII for their entire lives, and at most raise a few eyebrows when they see funny mis-encoding like "fiancée" in a few Latin Extended words here and there.