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Jessica Kerr
Engineering Manager of Developer Relations
Jess is a symmathecist, in the medium of code. She sees development teams as learning systems made of people and running software. If we make that software teach us what’s happening, it’s a better teammate. And if this process makes us into systems thinkers, we can be better persons in the world.
We Learn Systems by Changing Them
In the social world, there is no outside: we participate in the systems we study. I’ve noticed this in code: when I come to an...
Webinar Recap: How to Avoid Being On Call With Under-Instrumented Tools
"It's expensive. It's difficult. Our APM works just fine." The three myths of observability can lead to being on call with under-instrumented tools. That's exactly...
Honeycomb Supports Service Ownership
The software industry is moving toward teams that own the services they build. This concept encloses principles and possibilities from movements toward microservices, DevOps, Agile,...
Ask Miss O11y: As a developer, how can I try out observability?
Dear Miss o11y, What's the first small thing to do in o11y that would teach me something, bring something valuable, and open the way for...
Ask Miss O11y: Logs vs. Traces
Tracing looks like a lot of work. We already have logs. Why bother adding traces? Ah, good question! TL;DR: Trace instead of log. Traces show...
startSpan vs. startActiveSpan
TL;DR: startSpan is easier and measures a duration. Use it if your work won’t create any subspans. startActiveSpan requires that you pass a callback for...
Ask Miss O11y: Making Sense of OpenTelemetry: Who’s There? The Resource.
I’m adding instrumentation code to my app. To set it up, I have to create a Resource. What does that mean? What can I do...
Ask Miss O11y: OpenTelemetry in the Front End: Tracing Across Page Load
We want to measure the time that a user waits between pushing a button and seeing their result. The examples for creating a trace span...
Ask Miss O11y: Making Sense of OpenTelemetry—Context
“What is up with the Context in OpenTelemetry? Why do I need to mess with it at all? Why, when I set a span as...
Ask Miss O11y: Making Sense of OpenTelemetry—Tracer and TracerProvider
“There’s a lot to understand in OpenTelemetry; for instance, what is the difference between a Tracer and a TracerProvider? How should I use them?” OpenTelemetry...
Ask Miss O11y: Pre-production Environments
Should we build and run the full observability stack in pre-prod? How much realism vs. waiting for prod? Answer: Yes. You absolutely want observability in...
Ask Miss O11y: Observability Without Manual Tracing
I think my biggest question is: How do I introduce observability without manually weaving tracing-related code throughout my codebase since that adds a lot of...
Ask Miss O11y, Holiday Edition
Hey Miss O11y, what’s your favorite thing about Christmas? Ooh, good question! My favorite thing about this part of the year is that work slows...
Tracing Makes Concurrency Bugs Easy to Spot
Today, I found a concurrency bug before I noticed it. Like, it was subtle, and so I wasn’t quite sure I saw it—maybe I hadn’t...
Ask Miss O11y: Tracing Is for Async, Too
I have a good sense of how to use traces to understand my system’s behavior within request/response cycles. What about multi-request processes? What about async...