Honeycomb at PagerDuty Summit

We had an excellent time at PagerDuty Summit 2019. The folks we met at the booth and in the hallway track felt particularly kindred to Team Honeybee: we've all been on-call, and we all want it to be better.

The main themes of the conference revolved around best practices and learnings for finding issues faster, knowing exactly what to do in an incident, enabling on-call to know how to prioritize an alert, and what our community can do to improve on-call life. And if you were following along on twitter, Nathan definitely contributed his own on-call improvements from the Honeycomb booth!

Ten years of PagerDuty

In the opening keynote, PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada walked through the past ten years of digital transformation. While the main worry in 2009 may have been a website going down, today's problems have grown increasingly complex. There are an estimated 200 million apps, more than $500B in US e-commerce sales are on the line, and there are over 14.2 billion connected devices globally. 25% of enterprise businesses are using serverless architecture in prod. In this increasingly complex ecosystem, she says, running operations is like an extreme sport. One key takeaway from Jennifer's talk that really resonated with me was the importance of getting ahead of issues.

Other key highlights included Nathen Harvey, Developer Advocate [Google] & Stephanie Hippo, Senior Site Reliability Engineer [Google] sharing Best SRE Practices for Alerting and Incident Response; and Dawn Parzych, Developer Advocate [LaunchDarkly] raising the importance of Recognizing and Recovering from Burnout.

I was sad to miss the fireside chat with Andre Iguodala + Jennifer Tejada, but I did get to have fresh baked cookies and chocolate milk shots on a break :)

Christine on the Second Wave of DevOps

Christine Yen was on the #pdsummit19 stage for "Getting Comfortable with Production to Improve Your Life in Dev".

***SPOILERS***

Christine identifies as a developer, and wants us all to live in a world where tools speak the language of the developer, instead of developers conforming to the language of the tool. In this talk, Christine unpacks what it truly means, as a concrete day-to-day practice, for developers to own their code. She showed us the threshold where monitoring concludes and observability rises, and explained that if devs see how their code behaves in production, change is less scary and more intuitive. One of the core benefits of getting comfortable with prod is that it makes devs better at writing code.

And there's puppies and kittens!

Check out Christine's slides to get a glimpse of how to improve your code before the pager even beeps.

We'd like to thank the PagerDuty Team for an especially well-organized conference and a wonderful community event. Thank you for hosting Team Honeycomb at #pdsummit19!

Want to find more Honeybees speaking IRL? Check out our events calendar and stay tuned to @honeycombio on Twitter.