What Is a Feature Flag? Best Practices and Use Cases
Do you want to build software faster and release it more often without the risks of negatively impacting your user experience? Imagine a world where...
Rescue Struggling Pods from Scratch
Containers are an amazing technology. They provide huge benefits and create useful constraints for distributing software. Golang-based software doesn’t need a container in the same...
Experiments in Daily Work
In high school chemistry and then college physics labs, we learned a strong definition of "experiment." Experiments are tied to the Scientific Method, responsible for...
Anything But Tech Debt
Engineers often feel they aren’t allowed enough time to address tech debt. Product partners wonder why engineers spend so much time working on it—or at...
Evolving by Involving
In this post, we’re going to lay out the guiding principle that unifies the diverse world of CS as we see it—and show how we...
On Becoming a VP of Engineering, Part 2: Doing the Job
Charity once said an off-hand sentence that became a mantra for my transition into the VP of Engineering role: “Directors run the company.” This was...
On Becoming a VP of Engineering, Part 1: The Path to VP
In February of 2020, I was promoted from Director of Engineering to Honeycomb’s first VP of Engineering. Although Charity wrote an extremely generous public announcement,...
Improving LLMs in Production With Observability
In early May, we released the first version of our new natural language querying interface, Query Assistant. We also talked a lot about the hard...
How Traceloop Leverages Honeycomb and LLMs to Generate E2E Tests
At Traceloop, we’re solving the single thing engineers hate most: writing tests for their code. More specifically, writing tests for complex systems with lots of...
All the Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About when Building Products with LLMs
There’s a lot of hype around AI, and in particular, Large Language Models (LLMs). To be blunt, a lot of that hype is just some...
5 Ways Honeycomb Saves Time, Money, and Sanity
If debugging has sucked the soul out of your engineers, we’ve got the answer: event-based observability. Instead of spending hours and resources trying to find...
How We Use Smoke Tests to Gain Confidence in Our Code
Also known as confidence testing, smoke testing is intended to focus on some critical aspects of the software that are required as a baseline. The...
Generalists vs. Specialists: Figuring Out Your Path
Last month, I had the opportunity to join Jen Dary on her podcast, Be Plucky. The conversation was great, and we covered a lot of...
How Do We Cultivate the End User Community Within Cloud-Native Projects?
The open source community talks a lot about the problem of aligning incentives. If you’re not familiar with the discourse, most of this conversation so...
How We Define SRE Work, as a Team
The SRE team is now four engineers and a manager, and we are involved in all sorts of things across the organization, across all sorts...