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...
Simulation Theory, Observability, and Modern Software Practices
The 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard is widely read and cited within academic circles but also permeates popular culture, influencing films, literature,...
What Is Application Performance Monitoring?
Application performance monitoring, also known as APM, represents the difference between code and running software. You need the measurements in order to manage performance....
Where Does Honeycomb Fit in the Software Development Lifecycle?
The software development lifecycle (SDLC) is always drawn as a circle. In many places I’ve worked, there’s no discernable connection between “5. Operate” and “1....
Product Managing to Prevent Burnout
I’ve been thinking about a risk that—if I'm not careful—could severely hinder my team's ability to ship on time, celebrate success, and continue work after...
What Do Developers Need to Know About Kubernetes, Anyway?
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: you just pushed and deployed your latest change to production, and it’s rolling out to your Kubernetes...
What Happens to DevOps when the Kubernetes Adrenaline Rush Ends?
Kubernetes has been around for nearly 10 years now. In the past five years, we’ve seen a drastic increase in adoption by engineering teams of...
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...