2019: The Year Bee-hind Us

Once again we are at the end of another year, facing into the endless potential of the next one, and thinking back on the fun and hard work behind us. Join me now in a review of some of our achievements and amusements, features and funtimes, shout-outs and selfies--and we'll be back to do it all again in another 12 months :)

January

As seems to be our habit at the beginning of a new year, we shipped a major new feature--this year it was Tracing, which brings everything you need for deep, iterative debugging into one unified workflow and interface.

We arrived back to the office in the new year to some lovely whiteboard art from our leadership:

Filling our longtime need for a new Marketing mastermind, Deirdre joined us and shared her reasons for being excited about her role with us at the hive.

We celebrated Molly's "bee-niversary" in the time-honored manner:

and we wondered about the provenance of one of the many new signups we saw come across our Slack:

February

On the heels of shipping Tracing, we found ourselves humming along with the Talking Heads:

And we were all startled to realize that Ben had been with us for THREE YEARS at this point, but that didn't mean he got away with not wearing the bee suit:

March

Continuing in the theme of blowing minds, we shipped one of our most gray-matter-expanding features to date,  BubbleUp, allowing you to surface critical details and issues in your environment by just drawing a box with your mouse. We also published our auto-instrumenting Beeline for Java and made some Very Important Decisions in an all-hands meeting:

April

In April, we were incredibly lucky to convince SRE luminary and all-around genius Liz Fong-Jones to join us as a Developer Advocate.  True to form, she immediately joined our on-call rotation and shared her experience.

May

Ben made a spectacle of himself while hacking,

and we welcomed our users to a new landing page experience, aka Home, allowing you to immediately get comfortable with Honeycomb as soon as you arrive.

June

As we reached the halfway point in the year, we published our plans for a Maturity Model for observability and prepared for several months of research to inform and validate it.

We also confirmed that, as the legends tell us, Charity and Terraform don't always get along:

July

Another bee-niversary was celebrated, this time Emily tolerated our ministrations with her usual patience:

We began our first rounds of research for the Observability Maturity Model (OMM) with a set of roundtable discussions on the heels of the Velocity conference.

Not forgetting that the key to real observability is instrumentation, we shipped some much-requested updates to our Beeline for Ruby.

August

In August, we attended Jenkinsworld:

5 9s of JenkinsWorld honey right here! pic.twitter.com/DgdjuZJHpB

— Ben Hartshorne (@maplebed) August 15, 2019

We also may or may not have created a Toshok bot:

September

Charity contacted the home office for some critical advice on the contents of her hotel room in Amsterdam:

The war against the three pillars continued apace, and we got really excited about the OpenTelemetry project, Emily in particular:

(here's the footage, since Slack screenshots just don't convey it as needed:

And as if there were not enough things to get excited about, we also closed a funding round!

October

Thanks to Alyson instituting Official Selfie Time each week, October brought us some particularly inspiring selfies:

As well as many amusing tweets from Nathan and Wilde as they attended PagerDuty Summit:

November

In November, we were joined by Kimberly Falk in Product Marketing, we deepened our involvement in the OpenTelemetry project, and we got some tips for finding our next office:

December

The year wrapped up with a lot of buzz, including our first live webcast featuring the delightful folks from Eaze and the arrival of a veritable flurry of new bees, including Tavi Clark taking over the reins from Doña Croston, our much-beloved office EVERYTHING (*cry* we will miss you so much Doña but we know we're in good hands with Tavi), Irving Popovetsky in Customer Success, Megan Gleason in Product Management, Paul Osman in Integrations, and Rick Abruzzo in Event and Field Marketing.

We also made storage easier and simpler with our major storage unification project.

I had been watching for this particular critical milestone:

and we rounded out the year with a little dancing in the unit tests:

We hope you've left a little time for dancing in your year-end plans, and we look forward to sharing the benefits of ever-stronger observability superpowers  (and laughter) with you in the new year.