charity.wtf

Hazel Weakly, you little troublemaker.  As I whined to Hazel over text, after she sweetly sent me a preview draft of her post: “PLEASE don’t post this! I feel like I spend all my time trying to help bring clarity and context to what’s happening in the market, and this is NOT HELPING. Do you […]

I’ve never been good at “hot takes”. Anyone who knows anything about marketing can tell you that the best time to share your opinion about something is when everyone is all worked up about it. Hot topics drive clicks and eyeballs and attention en masse. Unfortunately, my internal combustion machine doesn’t run that way. If […]

Originally posted on the Honeycomb blog on November 19th, 2024 We’ve been talking about observability 2.0 a lot lately; what it means for telemetry and instrumentation, its practices and sociotechnical implications, and the dramatically different shape of its cost model. With all of these details swimming about, I’m afraid we’re already starting...

Recently we learned that Google spent $2.7 billion to re-hire a single AI researcher who had left to start his own company. As Charlie Brown would say: “Good grief.” 🙄 This is an (incredibly!) extreme example. But back in the halcyon days of the zero interest rate phenomenon (ZIRP), smaller versions of this tale played […]

Augh! I am so behind on so much writing, I’m even behind on writing shit that I need to reference in order to write other pieces of writing. Like this one. So we’re just gonna do this quick and dirty on the personal blog, and not bother bringing it up to the editorial standards of…anyone […]

Every year or so, some tech CEO does something massively stupid, like declaring “No politics at work!”, or “Trump voters are oppressed and live in fear!”, and we all get a good pained laugh over how out of touch and lacking in self-awareness they are. We hear a lot about the howlers, and much less […]

Originally posted on the Stack Overflow blog on June 10th, 2024 When I was 19 years old, I dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. I had a job offer in hand to be a Unix sysadmin for Taos Consulting. However, before my first day of work I was lured away to a […]

Originally posted on the Honeycomb blog on January 24th, 2024 The cost of services is on everybody’s mind right now, with interest rates rising, economic growth slowing, and organizational budgets increasingly feeling the pinch. But I hear a special edge in people’s voices when it comes to their observability bill, and I don’t think it’s […]

I recently joined a startup to run an engineering org of about 40 engineers. My title is VP Engineering. However, I have been having lots of ongoing conflict with the CEO (a former engineer) around whether or not I am allowed to have or hire any dedicated engineering managers. Right now, the engineers are clustered […]

Original title: “Why Should You (Or Anyone) Become An Engineering Manager?” The first piece I ever wrote about engineering management, The Engineer/Manager Pendulum, was written as a love letter to a friend of mine who was unhappy at work. He was an engineering director at a large and fast-growing startup, where he had substantially built […]

This is based on an internal quip doc I wrote up about careful communication in the context of rebuilding trust. I got a couple requests to turn it into a blog post for sharing purposes; here you go.🌈✨🥂 In this doc I mention Christine, my wonderful, brilliant cofounder and CEO, and the time (years ago) […]

You are a freshly minted manager. You come full of rage and frustration at the poor management you’ve endured and witnessed in tech, and you are god damn determined not to repeat all of those mistakes. You are tired of reporting to a manager who isn’t transparent with you, who hoards critical information and isn’t […]

Last month I got to attend GOTO Chicago and give a talk about continuous deployment and high-performing teams. Honestly I did a terrible job, and I’m not being modest. I had just rolled off a delayed redeye flight; I realized partway through that I had the wrong slides loaded, and my laptop screen was flashing […]

Honeycomb recently announced our $50M Series D funding round. We aren’t the type to hype this a lot; Emily summed it up crisply as, “Living another day on someone else’s money isn’t business success, even though it is a lovely vote of confidence.” Agreed. The vote of confidence does mean more than usual, given the […]

I recently got a plaintive text message from my magnificent friend Abby Bangser, asking about a conversation we had several years ago: “Hey, I’ve got a question for you. A long time ago I remember you talking about what an adjustment it was becoming a vendor, how all of a sudden people would just discard […]