Determining a CoPE’s Efficacy—and Everything After
As discussed in the first article in this series, a Center of Production Excellence (CoPE) is a more or less formal, provisional subsystem within an...
A CoPE’s Duty: Indexing on Prod
Building a center of production excellence (CoPE) starts with indexing on production. Here’s why. Odds are that a software engineer today is really focused on...
A CoPE’s Guide to Alert Management
Alerts are a perennial topic, and a CoPE will need to engage with them. The bounds of this problem space are formed by two types...
The CoPE and Other Teams, Part 2: Custom Instrumentation and Telemetry Pipelines
The previous post laid out the basic idea of instrumentation and how OpenTelemetry’s auto-instrumentation can get teams started. However, you can’t rely only on auto-instrumentation....
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...