moral purity: it's an impossible thing to achieve under capitalism, we can only do the best with the hand we're dealt. I know @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com has confronted many of the same moral challenges. The reality is that Substack has reach, and can offer that reach to marginalised people.

Totally not the point of this post, but I love this line from @charity.wtf: "infrastructure is the code you have to run in order to run the code you want to run" www.honeycomb.io/blog/the-meh...

#GOTOpodcast: Alex Ewerlöf and Charity Majors discuss: -> Why reliability isn’t free — and his “10x per 9” law -> Choosing SLIs that actually tie to business impact -> Making SLOs practical rather than performative .. and more 🎧 gotopia.tech/podcast

I retired in March, but today's React vuln should remind everyone that @charity.wtf has always been right: if you have a holiday code freeze, your build-test-deploy-rollback process is completely broken and you should not work on anything else until that's fixed.

Honeycomb really knows how to sticker!!! Thanks so much @charity.wtf ❤️

Fascinating article by @charity.wtf about hierarchy in engineering charity.wtf/2022/09/23/t... I took a step "down" recently (from Staff to Senior) because I was no longer experiencing joy at work (I am again now!) and this article resonated deeply with me. Definitely worth a read

Fantastic interview with @charity.wtf from the folks at @swarmia.bsky.social : www.swarmia.com/podcast/char... Key points: - you are unlikely to be successful if you are unhappy - staying close to coding improves your career - ops people rarely found companies because they are so cynical

"The Hierarchy Is Bullshit (And Bad For Business)": I don't know how it happened, but I re-read this AMAZING post by @charity.wtf from 2022 and I think that any person in a "management" position should read it ASAP 😊🙏🏽 charity.wtf/2022/09/23/t...

me and @charity.wtf talking shit about the ROI of observability, and how it's changing. it's great fun, obviously, given its us two reprobates. naturally there is profanity, and a little bit of progressive delivery www.honeycomb.io/resources/we...

I made a substack: charitydotwtf.substack.com. Some people questioned the ethics of doing so, so I put the project on hold for a few days to think and ask questions. I have decided to stay. Here is why. (also xpost: charity.wtf/2025/12/19/h...) charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/hello-worl...

anti-ai ai club

tryna remember.. 🧐 when did I (mostly) stop shitposting about metrics? 🧐 was it in .. 2021? 2022? TO THE ARCHIVES! 🔪 🧐

Talk to me if you have an interesting profiling use case. I'm doing some explorations :)

Is profiling the fourth pillar of observability?? SIGH. charity.wtf/2025/10/30/t...

for context: the second edition of "Observability Engineering" starts off swinging with an opinionated chapter called "The Fundamentals of Building Good Software". which begs the question... what IS ✨ good software ✨? i'll drop my answers 👇 but curious to hear others.

yeah let me clarify ... i know that lots of vendors have entry level, "the first hit is free" type of pricing tiers. i'm looking for a simple monitoring product at a simple price point that can scale up. like something you could get in 2015. thanks for all the recs! making a list, will investigate

spotted in the wild!! go matty! 🙌 recently shipped a v2 of this sticker, which i like even better:

"Manage subscriptions" is by far the best thing gmail has ever done since....gmail. discovered this last week, looks like it was rolled out in July.. have y'all found this?!? click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click, ahhhhh. simple joys. 🌱

so gartner mentions a customer of theirs who was spending $50k/year on monitoring in 2009, and $24M/year on observability in 2024. in 2009, people were paying for basic monitoring: up/down, slow, errors? is there any company out there still selling a monitoring product at a monitoring price point?

shipping is the heartbeat of your company. it should happen by default after each diff gets merged -- swiftly, automatically, no muss no fuss. i dub thee 'saint shelby' for thy proselytizing the good word.

yessss, grasshopper. code is liability. carry on 📈✨

I have a friend whose cat's name is Claude, and I'm just mad I didn't think of that.

Was turned on to this list by a post from @charity.wtf : mollysheets.com/2024/05/05/s... Has anyone put these into a bluesky starter pack for an easy follow? Searched here: blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs but didn't see anything.

And these stickers are awesome! My team is going to leave me nothing if they see these - also, we are literally living by these words at the moment!! #stickers #shipdangerously #featureflags

@charity.wtf kicked #o11yDaySFO off with truth bombs: observability teams are the single greatest leverage point in engineering orgs. stop treating them like cost centres! run them like platform teams. Our 2nd edition of o11y engineering (2026) will be 🔥🔥🔥!

Yes! 😅 At my team in "Clarity AI" we were doing Continuous Deployment... actually, that was referenced in another talk by Charity, two years ago, talking about ISO 27001 and SOC2: speakerdeck.com/charity/case...

@charity.wtf, for me she is a reference in many things. One of them is her stand against compliance and regulatory being seen as enemies of XP practices. This talk is pure gold: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR1J... "Stop blaming regulations and frameworks."

Nobody is born a great engineer. Great engineers are forged in the fires of experience -- year after year of compounding challenges and opportunities. Does your org frustrate the pursuit of greatness, or unlock and accelerate it? For whom? And then yes: shipping is the mechanics of learning.

This is a post by Anastasjia Uspenski about how the "myth of the 10x engineer" is actively harmful (the post is itself based on a talk by @charity.wtf at the Craft Conference in Budapest): shiftmag.dev/10x-engineer...

You can't always trust your gut when you're just starting out, but if you've had at least one good job in your life, you know what it feels like. Trust that. link: charity.wtf/2025/06/08/o...

. @charity.wtf (Honeycomb) interviews @alexewerlof.com(Volvo Cars) on the gap between Google's SRE ideals & reality. Key insight: SLOs are your team's API for pushing back against micromanagement.

Somehow this one didn't get wiped from the @honeycomb.io laptop before I bought it after leaving. @lizthegrey.com and @charity.wtf feel free to use this if you want, although questionable if you'd want to

ah. yes, it's true, as the AI has learned, i *do* have an evil doppelganger. her name is Charity Majors and she is a pastor's wife & influencer from Idaho who writes blush pink books about how Christian women can find their purpose. i can only hope she is more embarrassed by me than i am by her.

Also @alexewerlof.bsky.social calls this the 10x/9 rule: "For every 9 you add to your SLO, you’re making the system 10x more reliable but also 10x more expensive." 💭

Another great post by @charity.wtf and well said: "No point in over-engineering software to be more reliable or performant than it needs to be. Reliability is especially very expensive to design and maintain." Working with a lot of customers I find premature optimisation a common trap to fall into.

We are getting close to a wrap on (the first draft of) the second edition of "Observability Engineering", but there are a few places where I could use some of y'all's help. Find more details, Buffy quotes, AND a funtastic grammar quiz... 👉 charity.wtf/2025/10/13/g...

This one goes out to my family members, whom I dearly love, who will leave me 30, 45 minutes worth of voice recordings on their way to work, because they "don't have time to text". On FB Messenger, which does not have voice to text transcription. I just ...

Are there like...cat parent co-ops? Where you can swap and rotate cat toys around every few weeks as they grow bored of the current crop? 🤔 This might be the best startup idea I've ever had. Who wants to fund me? Yes, obviously we will use AI to match each cat with the perfect toy.

Are you an experienced software buyer? I could use your help. I'm working on the second edition of "Observability Engineering", and hoping to include the kind of advice an experienced principal engineer might give a staff engineer buying for the first time. charity.wtf/2025/09/19/a...

Financial markets are increasingly just gambling. Why do their profits get capital gains treatment when there is no capital being provided to anyone producting anything. If we want investment in the real economy, this kind of stuff should be facing a pigovian tax. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...

Join @aparker.io, MorgantePell, and James Bland on August 14 to explore Honeycomb MCP: Your AI Agent’s New Superpower. Learn the advantages of using the Honeycomb Hosted MCP through the new AWS Marketplace for AI Agents and Tools. Register: buff.ly/LKzrptg

Does anybody have a third party client for using both X and bsky that is more useful than hassle? After a solid 9 month experiment, I find myself torn. Bsky is just not as interesting or engaging as the app formerly known as Twitter. Politics has moved to bsky; tech has not. Tech is what I want.

Starting in a couple of minutes: Protocol Town Hall with @charity.wtf , on Observability and other matters. www.youtube.com/watch?v=13P3...

This is a thought provoking, bite sized little piece that boils down to, "don't give feedback on EVERYTHING, because not everything matters! give feedback on things that have impact." I think it's a *great* exercise for the feedback-giver to think through the impact they want their advice to have.

Ha! @charity.wtf I'm getting deja vu > Rails HTTP processing is built on a philosophy of “be liberal in what you accept” charity.wtf/2025/07/24/h... > You see Ruby, being the helpful language that it is, very kindly parses all manor of garbage bdarfler.hashnode.dev/introducing-...

Someone recently showed up in my LinkedIn comments, saying this: "You’re trying to prove you’re one of the ‘good ones’, but you’re only reinforcing that it takes ruthlessness and cunning to succeed." I think i responded saying something like: "Yeah, honey. It does. 💔"

Definitely not the first blog post inspired by a @monkchips.com comment, and won't be the last. Monkchips is the sand in my oyster that makes beautiful pearls. 🦪😆💕 (Still mean to circle back to the question of what it means to have good technical taste...) www.honeycomb.io/blog/disposa...

This hit reading @charity.wtf's post: > We’ve spent the past few decades ripping … down and drifting away from these communal hubs. But we haven’t stopped wanting them, or needing them. I hope, … that we are entering into a new era of rebuilding, sadder but wiser. charity.wtf/2025/07/09/t...

The distinction between disposable code and durable code is insightful, and so is the notion that disposable code can eventually become durable code. Also has stuff about AI-assisted coding. 😄 Recommended reading.

do you have thoughts on how to ramp engineers up on debugging unfamiliar systems? maybe even Strong Opinions™? @honeycomb.io is researching this right now, and i will hand mail a packet of our famous snarky systems stickers to anyone who can pitch in for 45 min. 🌈✨ app.lyssna.com/apply/604a21...