The CoPE and Other Teams, Part 1: Introduction & Auto-Instrumentation
The CoPE is made to affect, meaning change, how things work. The disruption it produces is a feature, not a bug. That disruption pushes things...
What Makes for a 'Good' Pair Programming Session?
Software changes so rapidly that developing on the cutting edge of it cannot fall to a single person. When it comes to asynchronously disseminating information...
Staffing Up Your CoPE
Getting the right people working in the CoPE is crucial to success because these change agents must limber up the organization and promote the flexibility...
Independent, Involved, Informed, and Informative: The Characteristics of a CoPE
In part one of our CoPE series, we analogized the CoPE with safety departments. David Woods says that those safety departments must be: independent, involved,...
Establishing and Enabling a Center of Production Excellence
Software is in a crisis. This is nothing new. Complex distributed systems are perpetually in a state far from equilibrium, operating in what Richard Cook...
A Day in the Life: Customer Success
We thought it'd be fun to give you some insights into what certain teams at Honeycomb do and how they spend their days, and who...
KubeCon NA 2023: What a Conference!
Now that we’ve had time to decompress from Kubecon, we wanted to do a writeup about our collective experience. Six of us spoke at the...
My Time As An Employee Board Member (The Weirdest Skip-Level)
In January 2022, Honeycomb kicked off a one year experiment to have an employee sit as a voting board member on the board of directors....
The Incident Retrospective Ground Rules
I joined Honeycomb as a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) midway through September, and it’s been a wild ride so far. One thing I was...
Engineers New to Honeycomb, What Did You First Notice About How We Do Things Here?
We’ve wondered, in the past, what new engineers think about how we do things at Honeycomb. This time, we asked! Meet Elliott and Reid, two...
On Counting Alerts
A while ago, I wrote about how we track on-call health, and I heard from various people about how “expecting to be woken up” can...
Going On Call for the First Time
Miss O11y addresses common concerns of being on call and provides helpful advice on how to overcome any fear it may bring....
Engineering Levels at Honeycomb: Avoiding the Scope Trap
It has been seven years since Rent the Runway posted their engineering ladder, kicking off a veritable trend of engineering teams open sourcing their ladders....
Why UX Designers Don’t Feel Valued—and Why This Is a Problem for Your Business
It’s time we had a real conversation about why UX designers everywhere are still unhappy, why that elusive “seat at the table” feels so impossibly...
How to Know Whether Your New Job Is a Shitshow or Not
We here at Honeycomb have some pretty strong opinions on the interviewing and hiring process: Namely, that it is broken af in our industry, for...