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Charity Majors

Charity Majors

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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.

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A Next Step Beyond Test Driven Development
June 23, 2020

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, then the code is improved so the tests pass….

Instrumentation
Observability
crystal ball
March 10, 2020

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 you hear it, and then you wonder how you…

Debugging
Instrumentation
Observability
beehoney
March 6, 2020

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 engineering: our own Emily Nakashima, formerly director of engineering…

Observability
pillars
September 24, 2019

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 bullshit. Briefly: monitoring is how you manage your known-unknowns,…

Observability
bee-bank
December 18, 2018

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 a cost or an investment? Part 2: Observability cost…

Logging
Metrics
Observability
armageddon
March 22, 2018

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 they? What’s the difference? You all know how I…

Observability
Software Engineering
Illustration of an eye in a magnifying glass surrounded by data charts, interface elements, and clouds.
November 14, 2017

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 theory, has been generating attention for one simple reason:…

Events
Instrumentation
Observability
droid running into a wall
October 24, 2017

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 speaker after speaker in talk after talk spent time…

Metrics
Observability
Testing in Production
September 12, 2017

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 with not enough testing before production: continuous integration, unit…

Instrumentation
Monitoring
dontevenknow
August 22, 2017

Observability: What’s in a Name?

“Is observability just monitoring with another name?” “Observability: we changed the word because developers don’t like monitoring.” There’s been a lot of hilarious snark about this lately. Which is great, who doesn’t love A+…

Debugging
Monitoring
Observability
blog_hny_5_ways_featured_image
October 8, 2016

Honeycomb and the Five Whys: Summary Post

Anchor post at the top of this week’s long series of “vision” posts, so everything doesn’t just appear backwards. 🙂 This week we set forth the case for why Honeycomb is the future. We’ve…

Observability
annie-spratt-QckxruozjRg-unsplash
October 6, 2016

Part 5/5: Building Badass Engineers and Badass Teams

No matter how much we love technology, it is always a means to an end. The mission comes first – we don’t do tech for its own sake, we use tech to get the…

Observability
blog_part_4-5_featured_image
October 6, 2016

Part 4/5: Everyone is a DBA

DBAs may be the last remaining priesthood in our industry. But software engineers and operations engineers are increasingly finding themselves responsible for precious company data, and DBAs are increasingly adopting generalist skillsets and best…

Observability
Operations
Software Engineering
blog_part_3:5_featured_image
October 6, 2016

Part 3/5: Dear Operations Engineers

It’s time to shrug off the last vestiges of that martyr complex we’ve been trudging around with since the bad old days of the BOFH. We’ve got better things to do with our lives…

Operations
blog_part_2:5_featured_image
October 5, 2016

Part 2/5: Dear Software Engineers

Observability is not a thing for operations or some other team to care about. Software engineers, you are increasingly the primary owners of your own services … and this is a great thing. Developers,…

Observability
Software Engineering
blog_part_1-5_featured_image
October 5, 2016

Part 1/5: Asking Better Questions

Any mature production system is likely to have hundreds of thousands if not millions of metrics, most of which never get looked at by a human. Metrics and logs are no longer human-scale, they…

Observability
blog-Why Honeycomb_ Black Swans-SOCIAL (1)
October 4, 2016

Why Honeycomb? Black Swans, Unknown-Unknowns, and the Glorious Future of Doom

Hello friends! We need to talk – about Honeycomb, you, and the future. We’ve built this thing to help ourselves and one another deal with the future of software. It isn’t Yet Another Monitoring…

Connectors & Integrations
Observability