Blog

Posts by Charity Majors

Software Engineering  

Deploys Are the ✨WRONG✨ Way to Change User Experience

I'm no stranger to ranting about deploys. But there's one thing I haven't sufficiently ranted about yet, which is this: Deploying software is a terrible,...

News & Announcements  

Honeycomb Welcomes New Field CTO

I am thrilled to share with you that Honeycomb now has a Field CTO: our very own Liz Fong-Jones....

Software Engineering   Operations  

The Future of Ops Is Platform Engineering

In the beginning, there were people who wrote and ran software. At some point, we spun away ops skills from dev skills into two different...

Teams & Collaboration   Software Engineering  

An Engineer’s Bill of Rights and Responsibilities

If you let all the power drift over to the engineering managers, pretty soon it doesn’t look so great to be an engineer. Now you...

Observability   Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: What Should An "Observability Team" Do?

People use “observability team” as a catchall basket for all kinds of things these days—from cutting-edge tech to truly heinous hacks. Eh, it is what...

Software Engineering   Best Practices  

“Why Are My Tests So Slow?” A List of Likely Suspects, Anti-Patterns, and Unresolved Personal Trauma

If you get CI/CD right, a lot of other critical functions, behaviors, and intuitions align to be comfortably successful and correct with minimal effort. If...

Observability   Featured  

Authors’ Cut—How Observability Differs from Traditional Monitoring

In this webinar based on our O'Reilly book, we go over the difference between observability and monitoring - and when to use which....

Observability   Best Practices  

✨ The ✨ Book✨ Is ✨ Done✨

The book is done. The book is FINISHED. There will be no more writing of the book! Holy macaroni. If you think you might be...

Instrumentation   Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: When should you delete instrumentation? 

When do you delete instrumentation? You delete instrumentation when you delete code. Other than that, if you’re doing things right: almost never. One of the...

Instrumentation  

New Honeycomb Whitepaper on Frontend Observability

Big news: I can finally stop pointing anyone who asks about Honeycomb’s story for frontend observability to Emily’s blog post from 2017 on “Instrumenting Page...

Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: Do I Need Observability If My Stack Is Boring?

Observability came out of microservices and cloud-native, right? If you have a simpler architecture, does o11y matter?” — this question came up during recent office...

Metrics  

The Truth About “MEH-TRICS”

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I said a lot of inflammatory things about metrics. “Metrics are shit salad.” “Metrics are...

Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: Observability vs BI Tools & Data Warehouses

You probably have already answered this before, but do you have a good rule of thumb for where o11y [observability] ends and BI [business intelligence]/data...

Instrumentation   Databases   Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: How Can I Add o11y to Databases?

How do we bring observability to the DB world? In the SQL Server world, you can marry up perfmon and extended event traces but is...

Culture  

How to Know Whether Your New Job Is a Shitshow or Not

We here at Honeycomb have some pretty strong opinions on the interviewing and hiring process: Namely, that it is broken af in our industry, for...

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