Charity Majors
CTO
Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of honeycomb.io. She pioneered the concept of modern Observability, drawing on her years of experience building and managing massive distributed systems at Parse (acquired by Facebook), Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering (O’Reilly). She loves free speech, free software and single malt scotch.
A Next Step Beyond Test Driven Development
The most successful software development movement of my lifetime is probably test-driven development or TDD. With TDD, requirements are turned into very specific test cases,...
We listened. Simpler Pricing. You’re welcome.
I’ve tackled this question before: how much should my observability stack cost? While the things in that post are true now as ever, I did...
The Future of Software is a Sociotechnical Problem
"Sociotechnical" I learned this word from Liz Fong-Jones recently, and it immediately entered my daily lexicon. You know exactly what it means as soon as...
Honeycomb Welcomes New VP Engineering
(Why it’s so important to look inside your org before you look outside) I am delighted to announce that we have a new VP of...
So You Want To Build An Observability Tool...
I've said this before, but I'm saying it again: observability is not a synonym for monitoring, and there are no three pillars. The pillars are...
How Much Should My Observability Stack Cost?
UPDATE: Charity has written an update on observability spend for 2025 with new figures. Read the two-part blog series here: Part 1: Is your observability...
Observability: A Manifesto
Everybody and their freaking grandpa is now claiming to do observability, not stodgy old monitoring. Fine, great. Nice to be trendy I guess. But are...
The New Best Engineer
If you make a habit of reading twitter or the writings of various thought lords and ladies of the internet, you’ve probably heard a lot...
Oncall and Sustainable Software Development
Yes, being on call typically and anecdotally sucks. I understand! If you’ve heard me speak, I often point out that I’ve been oncall since I...
Observations on the Enterprise of Hiring
Almost everybody hates interviewing. You aren’t wrong to hate it: interviewing is fucking broken, in ways that tear you down and rob you of your...
The Price is Right
Here at the hive, we’re working on something that isn’t code or new features(!), but is a big part of our business notwithstanding: figuring out...
Best Practices for Observability
Observability has been getting a lot of attention recently. What started out as a fairly obscure technical term, dragged from the dusty annals of control...
Metrics: not the observability droids you're looking for
I went to Monitorama last year for my first time. It was great; I had a terrific time. But I couldn’t help but notice how...
Bitten by a Kafka Bug - Postmortem
Dearest honeycombers, Yesterday, on Tuesday, Oct 17th, we experienced a partial service outage for some customers, and a small amount of data was dropped during...
Testing in Production: Why You Should Never Stop Doing It
Testing in production has gotten a bad rap—despite the fact that we all do it, all the time. This is probably because we associate it...