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...

Disposable code is here to stay, but durable code is what runs the world, and it isn't going anywhere either. www.honeycomb.io/blog/disposa... (Engineers who are freaking out about their jobs going away can stop now. 💜)

I’ve spent two hours reading this thread from six weeks ago and some of the linked articles. Sooooo much useful information and so many new (for me, at least) insights on Remote vs. Office. Thank you all for sharing! My mind is popping.

One of the communities that's teaching me how to do this is @kimcrayton1.bsky.social's Profit Without Oppression (community.profitwithoutoppression.com/landing?spac...), a community space of learning with business professionals who believe that profit does not have to come at the cost of people.

Josh wrote a beautiful piece on what drives him in the second half of his own career -- serving community, building things of enduring value, honoring those who came before us, ensuring agency and access to those who come after us. jlpjoshparsons.com/2025/07/22/t...

Resurrected my favorite blog post from the Parse days, on our painful, two year long migration/rewrite from Ruby to Go. Key graf: "'Monkeypatch' quickly became a key technical term that we learned to associate with our Ruby codebase." Memories....🎵🎶 charity.wtf/2025/07/24/h...

A few days ago I was like, "I was expecting more pushback to my piece", then @wnstn.bsky.social sent me some. You should read it, if you're into this kind of thing! Winston is right about this: I really do appreciate it when people engage critically with my writing. It takes courage; it's a gift.

"Being a founder is, well, it actually sucks. It's oddly like being repeatedly punched in the face." 🤣 too real

Even more fraught is any dicussion in finding meaning in such work, in creating, learning, excelling and finding joy in creating in professional work. This is ... pretty hard to talk about in leftie circles for reasons that I entirely understand, but I do think the r/antiwork was a disaster

In our (valid) criticism of power structures and capitalist excess we (bluesky lefties) fail to instill in the kids the degree to which selling our labour affords a kind of freedom; however fraught and imperfect.

This comment made me go digging to find out what article he was talking about. It was worth the side quest! Here, on whether enshittification is inevitable or not: apenwarr.ca/log/20250530

"I’ve come to believe that the most quietly radical, rebellious thing I can possibly do is to be an institutionalist, someone who builds instead of performatively tearing it all down."

Ever wondered why otel is so painful on the frontend and how we could make things better? Wonder no more! I had a lot of fun writing this article and venting a bit, but it wouldn’t be an article of mine if I didn’t share how the community is stepping up and how we can be a part of the change ❤️

I was honestly expecting to get a lot more pushback on this post than I've gotten (so far ☺️). I'll be the first to acknowledge there are issues with over-identifying with your work. My counter would be, I think it's better than constructing your identity out of what you buy.

Every slide in @charity.wtf's deck "In praise of normal engineers" is a banger speakerdeck.com/charity/in-p...

"The best engineering orgs are the ones where normal engineers can do great work". Charity Majors nailing it once again 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏 An absolute MUST-READ (and I usually don't say so), especially in these times where IMO the 10x engineers myth is reloaded (IMO because of AI)

@charity.wtf just arrived in the mail. better pictures later, when I’ll finish this on call shift.

New post up, with a bunch of thoughts on what drives me personally, and my own 40-year career (h/t @lethain.com). I have a pretty unusual life story. But one of the reasons I love the tech industry so much is how common unusual stories like mine have historically been. charity.wtf/2025/07/09/t...

Seriously, isn't this cool?

This is a major milestone in helping you get the most ROI from observability, and a fully vertically integrated telemetry pipeline. Other pipelines offer very little integration with the query engine; ours allows you to easily, at query-time, recall information that was originally archived to S3.

We just launched powerful new capabilities in the Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline, including graphical pipeline building functionality and "Enhance", which gives teams the ability to do the detective show-style "enhance the letters on that plate" for sampled data. AMA Thurs/Fri on @honeycomb.io!

Prep for the prod launch of the first component of a major rewrite of our loan servicing app is hitting high gear. An appropriate time to sport one of my (many) favorite @charity.wtf lines.

This is the deploy utopia @charity.wtf has been on for years and I'm extremely here for it. Tests pass I smash merge go for a beer get a notification that the deploy has gone out failed canary and been rolled back have another.

Huh.. I'd be pretty fucking irritated if I was this CEO and my CTO went off and bombed a huge initiative, then came back perkily informing me it was "his own personal training session" that "lasted two years and taught him what didn't work."

You can just graph your Claude Code usage using OpenTelemetry on Honeycomb.

I just released my edit of "In Praise of 'Normal' Engineers": why the best engineering orgs in the world are the ones where ✨normal engineers✨ can consistently move fast, ship code, fix shit, help their users, and move the business forward...a little more, every day. charity.wtf/2025/06/19/i...

I'm here for day 2 of #LDX3!! I'll be doing a book signing at 2pm (come get one!) and giving the very last talk of the day, on why the best engineering orgs are the ones that build systems where ✨normal engineers✨ can move fast, ship code, delight users, and move the business forward every day.

YES. There's a fair bit of content on how to run remote-first teams, and a smattering on remote-first startups. There is hardly anything from the perspective of remote-first VPs, or execs at larger companies. (If you have links, send them my way! Or if you write something -- same!!)

"I feel like we’re in the twilight of the DevOps movement,” @charity.wtf in conversation with @doerrfeldbill.bsky.social: leaddev.com/technical-di...

This is a terrific thread, with keen insight into some of the downsides of remote work, plus ways to mitigate or work around them. Love it. This is the kind of honest talk about tradeoffs that can help move the industry forward, thank you.

I’ve started referring myself as “community-taught” rather than “self-taught”. The type of problems, advice, and engineers I have had access to by working remotely and by discussing in online communities vastly overshadows the type of access I would have had at most local, in-office places.

worthwhile🧵on the remote-v-office-v-hybrid topic

I've heard a version of this from a number of folks, so it seems worth pulling out: Going all-remote with a core group of folks who got their start working in an office together is MATERIALLY DIFFERENT. It is WAY EASIER than trying to form & storm & norm with an all-remote team, from scratch.

New niblet post is up, on how long it does or should take to know if a job is right for you (or not). charity.wtf/2025/06/08/o... And how the bar should be higher for managers than ICs. An experienced engineer can usually tune out and turn in decent work; I'm not sure a manager can do the same.

This recent survey is informative to break down some myths about remote workers www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-w...

My sense is that even remote-first teams benefit from regular face-to-face gatherings, roughly every 2-3 months: martinfowler.com/bliki/Period...

Another one of my takeaways from this (great) thread: people have different experiences with remote vs in-person, and that’s completely ok I work remote, and my social batteries stay charged, due to activities with friends and acquaintances (largely driven by our kids)

Yeah this is a good point. We have harped over and over and over on how working remotely takes greater organizational maturity and support. It also demands certain skills from remote workers. Communication skills yes, particularly written ones. And something I guess I'd call...self-awareness?

"You can't outrun a lack of alignment." I talk a lot about the core feedback loops of development and deployment, and how you can accelerate by keeping them short and tight. But none of that matters unless you are working on the right things, things that move the business materially forward.