Charity Majors
CTO
Charity is an ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io. Before this she worked at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab on infrastructure and developer tools, and always seemed to wind up running the databases. She is the co-author of O’Reilly’s Database Reliability Engineering, and loves free speech, free software, and single malt scotch.
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...
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...
Event Foo: A Series of Unfortunate/Incredible Events
Good technical intuition is one of the things that defines a good senior engineer. And unpacking that intuition is the most valuable teaching tool. By...
Lies My Parents Told Me (About Logs)
Lots of us still believe some pretty silly things about logs. Most of these things used to be true! Some of them never really were....
Is Honeycomb a monitoring tool?
You may notice that we don’t talk about “monitoring” much, and that’s because we don’t really think of monitoring as what we do, even though...
Instrumentation: What does 'uptime' mean?
This is the second post in our second week on instrumentation. Want more? Check out the other posts in this series. Ping Julia or Charity...
Honeycomb FAQ in 140 Chars: Getting Started
Welcome! This will be a semi-regular series, where we answer frequently asked questions in short, digestible bites. Or if you prefer long philosophical essays about...