Observability: It's Every Engineer’s Job, Not Just Ops’ Problem
Observability is way more about software engineering than it is about operations. Operators are users of observability data for monitoring and alerting on systems. They’ll...
Enabling Design System Observability Using Honeycomb
At Honeycomb, we’re actively growing our design system, Lattice, to ensure accessibility, optimize performance, and establish consistent design patterns across our product. One metric we...
Slicing Up—and Iterating on—SLOs
One of the main pieces of advice about Service Level Objectives (SLOs) is that they should focus on the user experience. Invariably, this leads to...
Preempting Problems in a Sociotechnical System
Here at Honeycomb, we emphasize that organizations are sociotechnical systems. At a high level, that means that “wet-brained” people and the stuff they do is...
Against Incident Severities and in Favor of Incident Types
About a year ago, Honeycomb kicked off an internal experiment to structure how we do incident response. We looked at the usual severity-based approach (usually...
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...
Feature Focus: A Six-Week Progress Recap - September 2024
Over the past six weeks, we introduced a series of impactful updates aimed at making your observability workflows faster, more unified, and more collaborative. Here’s a...
Frontend Observability: A Candid Conversation With Emily Nakashima and Charity Majors
Frontend development has evolved rapidly over the past decade, but one challenge remains constant: understanding what’s happening in real-time across diverse browsers, environments, and user...
Syncing PagerDuty Schedules to Slack Groups
We’ve posted before about how engineers on call at Honeycomb aren’t expected to do project work, and that whenever they’re not dealing with interruptions, they’re...
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...
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...
A Vicious Cycle: Data Hidden Behind Lock and Key
Understanding production has historically been reserved for software developers and engineers. After all, those folks are the ones building, maintaining, and fixing everything they deliver...
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...
A Systematic Approach to Collaboration and Contributing to the Lattice Design System
The Honeycomb design team began work on Lattice in early 2021. Over several months, we worked to clean up and optimize typography, color, spacing, and...
Autocatalytic Adoption: Harnessing Patterns to Promote Honeycomb in Your Organization
When an organization signs up for Honeycomb at the Enterprise account level, part of their support package is an assigned Technical Customer Success Manager. As...