Charity Majors
CTO
Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of honeycomb.io. She pioneered the concept of modern Observability, drawing on her years of experience building and managing massive distributed systems at Parse (acquired by Facebook), Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering (O’Reilly). She loves free speech, free software and single malt scotch.
Ask Miss O11y: Do I Need Observability If My Stack Is Boring?
Observability came out of microservices and cloud-native, right? If you have a simpler architecture, does o11y matter?” — this question came up during recent office...
The Truth About “MEH-TRICS”
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I said a lot of inflammatory things about metrics. “Metrics are shit salad.” “Metrics are...
Ask Miss O11y: Observability vs BI Tools & Data Warehouses
You probably have already answered this before, but do you have a good rule of thumb for where o11y [observability] ends and BI [business intelligence]/data...
Ask Miss O11y: How Can I Add o11y to Databases?
How do we bring observability to the DB world? In the SQL Server world, you can marry up perfmon and extended event traces but is...
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...
Ask Miss O11y: I Don't Want to Be On Call Anymore. Am I a Monster?
“Can a subject matter expert ever step down?” Have you written anything about how to solve the ‘nobody wants to be on-call as a subject matter expert...
The Blog Is Dead; Long Live the Blog
Ever since the very beginning, Honeycomb has poured a lot of heart and soul into our blog. We take pride in knowing it isn’t just...
Observability: The 5-Year Retrospective
Two years ago, I wrote a long retrospective of observability for its third anniversary. It includes a history of instrumentation and telemetry, a detailed explanation of the...
The Least Worst Online Conference Ever
I am sick of online events. I can barely rouse myself to give a shit about one more virtual conference. They all start to feel...
Honeycomb Welcomes New VP of Product
I’m happy to announce that Megan Gleason, formerly Head of Product at Honeycomb, has been promoted to VP of Product. Prior to Honeycomb, Megan was...
The Future of Ops Careers
For most teams, operations engineering is more necessary than ever. Honeycomb CTO Charity Majors describes what that work looks like for modern software teams, and...
A Next Step Beyond Test Driven Development
The most successful software development movement of my lifetime is probably test-driven development or TDD. With TDD, requirements are turned into very specific test cases,...
We listened. Simpler Pricing. You’re welcome.
I’ve tackled this question before: how much should my observability stack cost? While the things in that post are true now as ever, I did...
The Future of Software is a Sociotechnical Problem
"Sociotechnical" I learned this word from Liz Fong-Jones recently, and it immediately entered my daily lexicon. You know exactly what it means as soon as...
Honeycomb Welcomes New VP Engineering
(Why it’s so important to look inside your org before you look outside) I am delighted to announce that we have a new VP of...