The Blog Is Dead; Long Live the Blog

Culture
Charity Majors

By: Charity Majors |

Culture

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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 your typical stream of feature updates and marketing promotions, but rather real, meaty pieces of technical depth, practical how-to guides, highly detailed retrospectives, and techno-philosophical pieces. One of my favorite things is when people who aren’t customers tell me how much they love our blog. Our mission has always been to help all software teams level up at observability, so they can get better at shipping software and delivering the sweat of their brow to users.

Lately, it feels like things have gotten a bit stale. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve posted some killer stuff lately—but the company has changed. It isn’t just made up of a handful of engineers doing everything anymore. The company has grown, the org scales, and the blog hasn’t really been owned by anyone in particular. And when I skim back through the archives, it starts to feel … thin.

Time for us to shake things up a bit. 😄

I’ll be taking point on the blog for the next quarter. Here are just a few of the things for you to look forward to:

Long-form deep dives.

You all (and we all) LOVED Vondrak’s dive into columnar storage, and we have a couple of follow-ups planned. I’m not going to leak the subject matter, but if your nerd feelers are already twitching, this is probably why.

Technical differentiators series.

We are going to do a 10-post series of pieces by the Honeycomb engineering team about some of our technical differentiators, with lots of screenshots and examples. It’s one thing to say how we’re different, and another thing entirely to see.

Advice column

We’ve tossed around the idea of an advice column for some time now, so I am delighted to introduce “Ask Miss o11y,” a weekly column written by jessitron, lizthegrey, and/or me, tackling your common (or wildly outlying) questions about observability. (We are also going to have a graphic, because this is ALL about scamming up some custom art.)

Don’t worry—some things will never change. We will continue posting elaborate, honest play-by-play retrospectives of our outages, for as long as we (Honeycomb and our blog) both shall live. 

Whether you’re a Honeycomb user or not, whether you’re a intro-level observability reader or a grand vizier, I think you will all be pretty stoked with what’s in store.

We’ll see you soon!

Charity

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Charity Majors

Charity Majors

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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.

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