Cofounder of honeycomb.io, coauthor of Database Reliability Engineering. Operations engineer, DBA, systems engineer, SRE, devops, etc. On call since I was 17.
The only good diff is a red diff.
First: nail user experience. We've built a service that's so fucking powerful that a few people will crawl over rusty nails and shards of glass to use it. Now it's time to circle back and make it more broadly available.
Instead of painstakingly instrumenting everything, we are building onramps to particular communities, so you can e.g. do "npm install honeycomb" and get all the basic stuff for free. I think this will help close the gap.
Second, I really deeply want to make honeycomb a mecca for distributed systems art and visualization. We need more visual metaphors for teasing out signal from noise, and more cutting edge art drawing on recent academic advances in data vis.
People are getting hit by this freight train of infra complexity, and I don't think A.I. is gonna save us in the next decade or so. What will save your ass is good design paired with intelligently plumbing your network. Turn it into a social graph question: when you get paged, what do you want to see? Obviously you want to see whatever questions were asked by the last person who got paged about this problem.
We have to look for ways to bring everyone up to the level of your best debugger, in every subject area. We have to get better at empowering teams, not individuals. Hell, I learned Linux by reading other people's .bash_history files. I want Honeycomb to feel like it's that embedded in your team and your social circle.
Third, I want to help software engineers demystify production. I want to take the CI/CD revolution another big step forward, and make it table stakes for every engineer to explore the consequences of their code in production, every time they deploy.
I think production should not just not be on the other side of a wall, but it should feel like the "fourth trimester" -- when you ship your code to prod, it's a blind, wailing, helpless, probably broken piece of shit when it first encounters real users, real data, real services, real network. You have to nurse it into growing up.
Software needs owners, not operators. Everything I'm consumed with is just details towards that goal.
Cofounder of honeycomb.io, coauthor of Database Reliability Engineering. Operations engineer, DBA, systems engineer, SRE, devops, etc. On call since I was 17.
The only good diff is a red diff.
Do you have any articles you've written or talks where you've discussed something similar to the "trimesters" of development? I love that insight, and the analogy of needing to nurse your systems/tech to maturity.
Cofounder of honeycomb.io, coauthor of Database Reliability Engineering. Operations engineer, DBA, systems engineer, SRE, devops, etc. On call since I was 17.
The only good diff is a red diff.
What are your biggest goals for honeycomb's next 1-2 years?
First: nail user experience. We've built a service that's so fucking powerful that a few people will crawl over rusty nails and shards of glass to use it. Now it's time to circle back and make it more broadly available.
Instead of painstakingly instrumenting everything, we are building onramps to particular communities, so you can e.g. do "npm install honeycomb" and get all the basic stuff for free. I think this will help close the gap.
Second, I really deeply want to make honeycomb a mecca for distributed systems art and visualization. We need more visual metaphors for teasing out signal from noise, and more cutting edge art drawing on recent academic advances in data vis.
People are getting hit by this freight train of infra complexity, and I don't think A.I. is gonna save us in the next decade or so. What will save your ass is good design paired with intelligently plumbing your network. Turn it into a social graph question: when you get paged, what do you want to see? Obviously you want to see whatever questions were asked by the last person who got paged about this problem.
We have to look for ways to bring everyone up to the level of your best debugger, in every subject area. We have to get better at empowering teams, not individuals. Hell, I learned Linux by reading other people's .bash_history files. I want Honeycomb to feel like it's that embedded in your team and your social circle.
Third, I want to help software engineers demystify production. I want to take the CI/CD revolution another big step forward, and make it table stakes for every engineer to explore the consequences of their code in production, every time they deploy.
I think production should not just not be on the other side of a wall, but it should feel like the "fourth trimester" -- when you ship your code to prod, it's a blind, wailing, helpless, probably broken piece of shit when it first encounters real users, real data, real services, real network. You have to nurse it into growing up.
Software needs owners, not operators. Everything I'm consumed with is just details towards that goal.
Always count on a startup founder to have lots to say about these sorts of things 🙂
... i can keep going ... 😇
Damn, thanks for such a great response.
Do you have any articles you've written or talks where you've discussed something similar to the "trimesters" of development? I love that insight, and the analogy of needing to nurse your systems/tech to maturity.
And thank you for doing an AMA!
I have a draft. I hope to finish it this week. :)
Thanks for having me!