Software Engineering

July 5, 2018

Level Up With Derived Columns: Understanding Screen Size (With Basic Arithmetic)

When we released derived columns last year, we already knew they were a powerful way to manipulate and explore data in Honeycomb, but we didn’t realize just how many different ways folks could use them. We…

March 22, 2018

Observability: A Manifesto

Everybody and their freaking grandpa is now claiming to do observability, not stodgy old monitoring. Fine, great. Nice to be trendy I guess. But are they? What’s the difference? You all know how I…

Observability

Software Engineering

March 15, 2018

Travis Redman

Resolving High CPU Usage in Kubernetes With Honeycomb

At Honeycomb, we’re excited about Kubernetes. In fact, we’re in the early stages of moving some of our services to k8s. Tools like kops have made getting started with k8s easier than ever. But…

March 8, 2018

The New Best Engineer

If you make a habit of reading twitter or the writings of various thought lords and ladies of the internet, you’ve probably heard a lot of advice on what software engineers should do, like:…

Observability

Software Engineering

February 27, 2018

Rachel Perkins

Sam Stokes talks about data infrastructure on the Data Engineering Podcast

This past week, Honeycomb engineering manager Sam Stokes was interviewed on the Data Engineering Podcast, and in addition to hearing him talk a little about himself (which as far as I can tell, he…

February 15, 2018

Oncall and Sustainable Software Development

Yes, being on call typically and anecdotally sucks. I understand! If you’ve heard me speak, I often point out that I’ve been oncall since I was 17 years old—so I know how terrible it…

Observability

Software Engineering

August 1, 2017

Rachel Perkins

Event Foo: Building Better Events

This post from new Honeycomber Rachel Perkins is the seventh in our series on the how, why, and what of events. An event is a record of something that your system did. A line…

June 28, 2017

Build Observable Systems

What should you log? When your systems break, it’s great to be able to look at what they were doing just before they broke. A log is a common solution. But hands up if…

May 23, 2017

How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 4: Check Before You Change

This post continues our dogfooding series from How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 3: End-to-end Failures. As Honeycomb matures, we try to roll out changes as smoothly as possible to minimize surprise on the part…

April 20, 2017

ES7 await/async and superagent

TL;DR await/async are awesome, and you should use them instead of callbacks wherever you can (which is everywhere.) Async functions for ECMAScript is a stage 3 (“candidate”) proposal for inclusion in the next version…

Observability

Software Engineering

October 6, 2016

Charity Majors

Part 4/5: Everyone is a DBA

DBAs may be the last remaining priesthood in our industry. But software engineers and operations engineers are increasingly finding themselves responsible for precious company data, and DBAs are increasingly adopting generalist skillsets and best…

October 5, 2016

Part 2/5: Dear Software Engineers

Observability is not a thing for operations or some other team to care about. Software engineers, you are increasingly the primary owners of your own services … and this is a great thing. Developers,…

Observability

Software Engineering