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...
Deploys Are the ✨WRONG✨ Way to Change User Experience
I'm no stranger to ranting about deploys. But there's one thing I haven't sufficiently ranted about yet, which is this: Deploying software is a terrible,...
Caring for Complex Systems: We Can Do This
When we work at it, professionals are pretty good at analysis. We can break down a simple system, look at its parts and their relations,...
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...
On Building a Platform Team
It may surprise you to hear, but Honeycomb doesn’t currently have a platform team. We have a platform org, and my title is Director of...
The Future of Ops Is Platform Engineering
In the beginning, there were people who wrote and ran software. At some point, we spun away ops skills from dev skills into two different...
An Engineering Manager's Bill of Rights (and Responsibilities)
So many of the best and most promising managers I know have left management roles for senior IC roles since 2018, and as someone who...