An Engineer’s Bill of Rights and Responsibilities
If you let all the power drift over to the engineering managers, pretty soon it doesn’t look so great to be an engineer. Now you...
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...
“Why Are My Tests So Slow?” A List of Likely Suspects, Anti-Patterns, and Unresolved Personal Trauma
If you get CI/CD right, a lot of other critical functions, behaviors, and intuitions align to be comfortably successful and correct with minimal effort. If...
Exploring AWS Costs Beyond the Service Level
This post will talk about using a derived column to directly connect individual customer experiences to the cost of providing that service with AWS Lambda....
The power of asking questions
This is a guest post by Vlad Ionescu. Vlad Ionescu jokingly describes himself as a "Professional mistake avoider" which is a better way of saying...
On the Brittleness of Dashboards
Dashboards are one of the most basic and popular tools software engineers use to operate their systems. In this post, I'll make the argument that...
How We Define SRE Work
At the time of writing this post, I have officially been at Honeycomb for one year as a site reliability engineer (SRE). I had shared...
Incident Report: The Missing Trigger Notification Emails
On November 18, between 00:50 and 00:56 UTC, an update was deployed that improved Honeycomb’s business intelligence (BI) telemetry available from our production operations environment....
Incident Resolution: Do You Remember, the Twenty Fires of September?
From September to early October, Honeycomb declared five public incidents. Internally, the whole month was part of a broader operational burden, where over 20 different...
Game Launches Should Be Exciting for Your Players, Not for Your LiveOps Team
This blog was co-authored by Amy Davis. The moment of launching something new at a game studio (titles, experiences, features, subscriptions) is a blockbuster moment...
Lessons Learned From the Migration to Confluent Kafka
Over the last few months, Honeycomb’s platform team migrated to a new iteration of our ingest pipeline for customer events. Our migration to this newer...
The Future of Developer Careers
While JavaScript frameworks come and go, a change has been brewing over the last several years that will permanently change what it means to be...
Incident Review: Meta-Review, August 2020
Every once in a while, teams or systems hit an inflection point where enough things change at once and the pattern of incidents shifts. We...
Bees Working Together: How ecobee’s Engineers Adopted Honeycomb
At ecobee, adopting Honeycomb started as a grassroots effort. Engineers signed up for the free tier and quickly started sharing insights with teammates. When it...
Observability: 80% Practicing in the Next 2 Years
Observability is more than tooling. Of course having the right tools in place so you can ask arbitrary questions about your environment, without having to...