I’m Honeycomb’s newest engineer, now on my eighth week at Honeycomb. Excitingly, I did my first week of oncall two weeks ago! Almost every engineer at Honeycomb participates in oncall, and I chose to join in the tradition. This may seem unconventional for a Developer Advocate — surely my time might be better spent holding more meetings with customers and giving more talks? Yet, I found that being oncall was the right decision for me.
Most modern web apps end up sprouting some subset of tasks that happen in the “background”, i.e., when a user is not directly waiting on the request from a server to finish. These types of tasks range across all kinds of use cases – processing media, generating aggregate statistics for later view in the front end, and syncing data to 3rd party providers are just a few of many examples.
“We can know one thing: shit’s gonna fail.” Last week we participated in SRECon Americas, held across three days of intensive learning with practitioner talks, hands-on workshops, socializing, and of course vendor booths. Now in its third year, attendees numbered 650 with an additional ~300 from sponsors and organizers.
If you’re trying to evaluate and understand the ROI of building an observability practice and carve out a budget for it, you’re not alone. You’ve probably got some monitoring and metrics capability already, but that’s proving to not be enough–how can you empower your teams as your environment becomes too complex for the basics? And how much will that cost?
Customer success can be a serious differentiator and competitive advantage for companies today. Everyone wants to ship quality products to their customers faster, and the rise of subscription-based pricing and SaaS applications in the last decade means that ensuring customer success is a more critical part of the business than ever.
A few weeks ago, BubbleUp came out of Beta. We’ve been getting fantastic user feedback on how BubbleUp helps users speed through the Core Analysis Loop and lets people find things they never could have found before. We’ve also been learning more about how BubbleUp works with Tracing, which unearthed some difficult issues. Today, we’re taking those head on.
When I first joined this startup that makes an observability platform, I was a front-end Javascript developer who had never ssh’ed into production–I didn’t even know what tracing or monitoring or metrics were, let alone what it meant for logs to be structured or how they could be useful to me. But within a couple months I joined the on-call rotation, and now share responsibility in our services along with the rest of my team.
I’ve never been on-call, but I’ve been on-call adjacent for a lot of my adult life—my partners, my housemates, my friends…they’ve largely been sysadmins, in Operations, or Dev/Ops, which means I’ve experienced a lot of the pain second-hand.
At Honeycomb, we’re pretty engineering-focused. We think our product is something every developer can benefit from, and we’re working to build something we would want to (and do!) use every day to make our own jobs easier.
DevOps, Observability, Continuous Delivery, Test in Production, Chaos Engineering, and Software Ownership are all major themes in software development today, but why? In an ideal world, we get everything right the first time, nothing breaks, no one DDOS’ us, and the weather report is “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs.” Reality of course is different – and better, to be honest.
