Podcast appearances and mentions of charity majors

In episode 81 of o11ycast, Charity Majors and Martin Thwaites dive into a lively discussion with Hazel Weakly and Matt Klein on the evolving landscape of observability. The guests explore the concept of observability versioning, the challenges of cost and ROI, and the future of observability tools, including the potential convergence with AI and business intelligence.

In episode 81 of o11ycast, Charity Majors and Martin Thwaites dive into a lively discussion with Hazel Weakly and Matt Klein on the evolving landscape of observability. The guests explore the concept of observability versioning, the challenges of cost and ROI, and the future of observability tools, including the potential convergence with AI and business intelligence.

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. This is the Engineering Culture Trends Report for 2025. Featuring the InfoQ editorial team and special guest Charity Majors, they discuss how AI is transforming software development with dramatic productivity gains alongside quality concerns, emphasize the continued importance of team collaboration, observability, engineering metrics, and mentorship of junior engineers in creating high-performing software teams. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/42F8TWt Subscribe to the Software Architects' Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: InfoQ Dev Summit Boston (June 9-10, 2025) Actionable insights on today's critical dev priorities. devsummit.infoq.com/conference/boston2025 InfoQ Dev Summit Munich (October 15-16, 2025) Essential insights on critical software development priorities. https://devsummit.infoq.com/conference/munich2025 QCon San Francisco 2025 (November 17-21, 2025) Get practical inspiration and best practices on emerging software trends directly from senior software developers at early adopter companies. https://qconsf.com/ QCon AI New York 2025 (December 16-17, 2025) https://ai.qconferences.com/ The InfoQ Podcasts: Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts: - The InfoQ Podcast https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/ - Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture - Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/ Follow InfoQ: - Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq - Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ - LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq - Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 - Instagram: @infoqdotcom - Youtube: www.youtube.com/infoq Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development. - Join a community of experts. - Increase your visibility. - Grow your career. https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

In this special year-end episode of OpenObservability Talks, we are thrilled to host Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, for an insightful conversation on the state of observability. Charity and our host Horovits recently delivered keynotes at Open Source Observability Day, which sparked fascinating discussions on the evolution of open observability and its impact on the broader industry. Together, they run a 2024 yearly postmortem on the key insights and trends, exploring what the observability community and industry have accomplished this year. Looking ahead, they also discuss what's on the horizon for observability in 2025 and beyond. Charity Majors pioneered the concept of modern Observability, drawing on her years of experience building and managing massive distributed systems at Parse (acquired by Facebook), Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering (O'Reilly).  Join us for this fireside chat as we wrap up the year with the influential voices in observability. The episode was live-streamed on 9 December 2024 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7ssNKAmYMs You can read the recap post at https://medium.com/p/94f80fff77e8/ OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube. We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat. ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠   https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability⁠ Show Notes: 00:00 - intro 01:51 - major observability trends of 2024 05:14 - OpenTelemetry trends 07:50 - Observability 2.0 14:45 - AI for DevOps and Observability 27:02 - Platform engineering 36:37 - observability query and data analytics 43:40 - observability for business insights 46:53 - how to start observability in Greenfield projects 50:15 - additional use cases for observability 54:11 - controlling cost of observability 58:47 - outro Resources: Practitioner's guide to wide events: https://jeremymorrell.dev/blog/a-practitioners-guide-to-wide-events/ Charity Major's blog on Observability 2.0: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/time-to-version-observability-signs-point-to-yes Observability Is A Data Analytics Problem: https://insideainews.com/2022/04/07/observability-is-a-data-analytics-problem/ Platform as a Product survey by the CNCF: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7267977952242397185/ SaaS observability: https://medium.com/p/b2db276305b2 Expensive Metrics: Why Your Monitoring Data and Bill Get Out Of Hand: https://medium.com/p/e5724619e3f1 Sampling best practices: https://logz.io/learn/sampling-in-distributed-tracing-guide/ Socials: Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ Dotan Horovits ============ Twitter: @horovits LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon BlueSky: @horovits.bsky.social Charity Majors ============ Twitter: https://x.com/mipsytipsy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charity-majors Mastodon: @mipsytipsy@hachyderm.io BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/mipsytipsy.bsky.social

This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted.https://gotopia.techRead the full transcription of this interview here:https://gotopia.tech/articles/336Charity Majors - CTO at honeycomb.io & Co- Author of "Observability Engineering"James Lewis - Software Architect & Director at ThoughtworksRESOURCESCharityhttps://twitter.com/mipsytipsyhttps://github.com/charityhttps://linkedin.com/in/charity-majorshttps://charity.wtfJameshttps://twitter.com/boicyhttps://linkedin.com/in/james-lewis-microserviceshttps://github.com/boicyhttps://www.bovon.orgDESCRIPTIONWhat's next in the observability space? Join Charity Majors and James Lewis as they discuss canonical logs, Observability 2.0 and how to simplify complexity in software engineering!RECOMMENDED BOOKSCharity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones & George Miranda • Observability Engineering • https://amzn.to/38scbmaCharity Majors & Laine Campbell • Database Reliability Engineering • https://amzn.to/3ujybdSKelly Shortridge & Aaron Rinehart • Security Chaos Engineering • https://www.verica.io/sce-bookNora Jones & Casey Rosenthal • Chaos Engineering • https://amzn.to/3hUmuAHRuss Miles • Learning Chaos Engineering • https://amzn.to/3hCiUe8Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble & Gene Kim • Accelerate • https://amzn.to/442Rep0BlueskyTwitterInstagramLinkedInFacebookCHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUSJoin this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/joinLooking for a unique learning experience?Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.techSUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

It's the end of an era on Dev Interrupted as we say farewell to host Conor Bronsdon and welcome a fresh voice, Andrew Zigler!Join us for a nostalgic trip down memory lane as Conor revisits his favorite interviews and moments from Season 4 and beyond, including discussions on chaos engineering, technical debt, and the human side of managing software engineers. He shares memorable stories from guests like Charity Majors, Rob Zuber, Kelly Vaughn, and many more, while reflecting on the evolution of Dev Interrupted and its impact on the engineering leadership community.But it's not all bittersweet. Get an exclusive sneak peek at the exciting changes coming to Dev Interrupted in 2025. Expect the show to double down on research and data, explore new formats, and even hit the road with live events. Plus, the Dev Interrupted Substack will feature more frequent newsletters, unique analysis of research white papers, and insights from guest writers. You don't want to miss this special episode filled with laughter, reflection, and a surprise holiday-themed game of Would You Rather. The team is taking off the holidays but we'll see you back here on January 7th for the start of Season 5!Show Notes:2025 Engineering Benchmarks Insights WebinarKeep up with Conor: SubstackListen to Conor at: Chain of Thought PodcastSupport the show: Subscribe to our Substack Leave us a review Subscribe on YouTube Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn Offers: Learn about Continuous Merge with gitStream Get your DORA Metrics free forever

• Supercharge your mind and energy while calming your system with Magic Mind for 20% off with this link: https://www.magicmind.com/JAVAWITHJEN20 • LEAVE JEN A RATING ⭐️ & REVIEW: ⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/java-with-jen-hearing-gods-voice-for-everyday-life/id1257356393?mt=2⁠ ------------------------------- In today's episode, I'm sitting down with the amazing Charity Majors, a powerhouse entrepreneur, author, speaker, and connector. We're diving into some real talk about something I know a lot of you are feeling—the tension between running a business or a household, and following God's call on your life. Maybe you've felt stuck, like there's this bigger purpose tugging at your heart, but you're not sure how to align your business with God's plan. You might even wonder if it's possible to thrive as a woman in the marketplace while being led by the Holy Spirit. Well, trust me, Charity's got a whole lot of wisdom to share on that! Here's what we dig into: - Charity's personal journey from loss and grief to launching a thriving business ministry that equips and empowers women to rise up in the marketplace. - How to recognize your prophetic voice and why it's crucial for your business success. - Standing firm in faith—because let's be real, the enemy is working overtime to mess with your confidence, but God's given you authority to **push back and rise up**. - Building a community of like-minded women entrepreneurs who are aligned with God's bigger plan—because we all need people who get it, who support the vision, and who remind us of who we're called to be. If you've ever felt like you're meant for more but you're unsure how to move forward, this episode will light a fire in your spirit. Charity reminds us that God is using women like YOU to bring revival in the marketplace, and it's time to step into your role as a prophetic leader in business. Grab your coffee, headphones, and let's jump in! CONNECT WITH CHARITY: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/charitymajors/ Podcast: https://www.charitymajors.com/podcast Shop her goodies! https://www.charitymajors.com/shop ----------------------------- CONNECT WITH JEN: Thank you for rating, reviewing and sharing the show on social media, this makes such an enormous difference on the reach of this podcast!   Follow and tag me on Instagram @javawithjen or Facebook @javawithjenpodcast , and Share when you're listening to a show!   I love seeing your posts

Welcome to episode 117 of the Testing Peers podcast.This time, join Chris, David, Russell and Heather as we discuss closure and letting go!Heather kicks us off with a discussion around last-minute travel decisions and we think Russell probably wins!The Peers then jump into a discussion about letting go.Changing roles. What is your identity? Who am I (professionally)?What am I good at? What do I enjoy? What will I do when I retire?Is it out of your control?What can we do as leaders? How can we ensure our teams are heard?The Peers talk about adaptability and agility. The toll and fatigue that can be associated with letting go.Russell spins the conversation around more positivity so what are the group proud to have let go of?Heather mentions ShipItCon, specifically the talk by Charity Majors you can find a link to watch it here.The Testing Peers Conference 2025 has now launched the CFP: https://testingpeerscon.com/collaboration-2025/ContactUs@TestingPeers.comTwitter (https://twitter.com/testingpeers)LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/testing-peers)Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/testingpeers/)Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/TestingPeers)We're also now on GoodPods, check it out via the mobile app storesIf you like what we do and are able to, please visit our Patreon to explore how you could support us going forwards: https://www.patreon.com/testingpeersSupport the show

In this episode of Breaking Changes, Postman Head of Product-Observability Jean Yang sits down with Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb. Charity dives into her journey as a tech founder, exploring her experiences in startups and operations engineering, as well as the significance of observability and the industry's evolving landscape. Charity emphasizes the importance of transparency and trust in team building and reflects on Honeycomb's growth and evolving hiring practices.   For more on Charity Majors, check out the following: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charity-majors/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy Personal Website: https://charity.wtf/ Honeycomb Website: https://www.honeycomb.io/   Follow Jean on Twitter/X @jeanqasaur. And remember, never miss an episode by subscribing to the Breaking Changes Podcast on your favorite streaming platform, company website at https://www.postman.com/events/breaking-changes or Postman's YouTube Channel—just hit that bell for notifications.   #BreakingChanges3 #apis #podcast #postman #honeycomb #TechLeadership #EntrepreneurialJourney #ProfessionalGrowth #TechInnovation #StartupSuccess #BusinessInsights #EntrepreneurMindset #careersuccess #PersonalGrowthJourney #observability   Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction and Background 03:58 - Getting into Startups and Leadership 07:07 - Transition to Leadership 08:47 - Current Role and Challenges 15:01 Observability and Breaking Changes 20:23 - Smooth Changes and Lessons 26:01 - Failed Changes and Lessons 30:40 - What Hasn't Changed 33:09 - Surprising Changes 35:09 - People Growth and Hiring 39:57 - Evolution of Hiring Practices 40:27 - Evolution of Hiring and Decision-Making 42:10 - Leveraging Hype while Staying True to Vision 45:10 - Changing the Industry and Fostering Inclusive Culture 47:06 - Underrated Breaking Changes in the Industry 49:24 - AI and Understanding Systems 50:03 - Exciting Changes in Observability 50:47 - Where to Find Charity

In this episode of Business & Bubbly, join your host, Charity Majors, as she shares her journey of healing, contentment in the promise fulfilled, and the message meant for more. The episode is an inspirational guide through navigating seasons of waiting, finding purpose, and cherishing the sweetness of answered prayers. So, grab your favorite drink and get ready to be empowered to embrace life's journeys with a sense of contentment. Introduction: As Charity Majors, the host of Business & Bubbly, shares her personal experiences, viewers are invited to embrace the concept of contentment in the promise fulfilled while navigating life's challenges. Summary: The episode revolves around Charity's journey from grief, loss, and shame to finding purpose and belief. It emphasizes the significance of waiting for promises to be fulfilled, finding contentment, and truly cherishing the journey. Listeners will be inspired to seek a deeper understanding of themselves, their purpose, and God's promises for them. Speaker Bio: Charity Majors, the host of Business & Bubbly, is an author, speaker, and transformational facilitator. She is passionate about igniting the purpose in women and empowering them to embrace their God-given identities. Key Takeaway: Finding contentment in the promise fulfilled and embracing life's journeys. Navigating through seasons of waiting and holding onto promises. Embracing the fulfillment of promises and cherishing each moment. Encouraging women to step into their influence and purpose. Embracing a deeper understanding of God's promises and revelations.   Discussion Points: 1. Charity's journey from grief and shame to finding purpose (00:02:58) 2. Embracing contentment in the midst of waiting (00:05:00) 3. Finding purpose and belief despite external circumstances (00:07:02) 4. The revelation of God's character and promises (00:12:03) 5. Encouraging others to seek and recognize God's revelations (00:15:17) Summary and Call to Action: ============================================================= As you listen to this engaging episode, you'll be encouraged to seek contentment in the promise fulfilled, embrace your journey, and recognize the beauty in waiting. Join Charity Majors as she shares her powerful insights, and don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. Cheers to your success! Get 50 of the BEST networking questions by texting the words "networking questions" to 833-231-8098 Get a FREE trial into our virtual networking chapter and connect with like-minded women in business by going to https://www.businessandbubbly.com/virtual-free-trial If you're a connector in your area and would like to bring a chapter of Business & Bubbly to your area, visit BusinessAndBubbly.com and click the "apply to be a Director" button to learn more.

Charity Majors joined Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about the idea of "innovation tokens"--a fixed budget for, so called, "innovative" projects. When is boring better and when is innovation the safer approach? Is Oxide issuing innovation tokens in some sort of hyper-inflationary cycle!?In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Charity Majors.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Glyph: Against Innovation TokensCharity's Twitter ThreadOxF: Let That Sink In! (Whither Twitter?) with CharityDruidScuba whitepaperOxide RFD 68: Partnership as Shared ValuesGood Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard RumeltDropshot and ProgenitorOxF: The Pragmatism of HubrisOxF: HeliosIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of honeycomb.io. She pioneered the concept of modern Observability, drawing on her years of experience building and managing massive distributed systems at Parse (acquired by Facebook), then subsequently at Facebook, and at  Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering (O'Reilly). She loves free speech, free software and single malt scotch.    Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know: - web: kubernetespodcast.com - mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com - twitter: @kubernetespod   News of the week CNCF Blog: Vitess 20 is now Generally Available Vitess Blog: Announcing Vitess 20 Anthropic Blog: Claude 3.5 Sonnet KubeCon India 2024 CFP Apps on Azure Blog: Announcing support of OCI v1.1 specification in Azure Container Registry VMware Tanzu Blog: Announcing VMware Tanzu Greenplum 7.2: Powering Your Business with Enhanced Performance and Advanced Capabilities VMware Tanzu Blog: Join the public beta for GenAI on Tanzu Platform today! CNCF: Adobe End User Journey Report Links from the interview Honeycomb.io O'Reilly Book: Observability Engineering O'Reilly Book: Database Reliability Engineering Charity's blog site: charity.wtf Charity Blog: Questionable Advice: “My boss says we don't need any engineering managers. Is he right?” Daniel H. Pink book: “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” In which, “He examines the three elements of true motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose-and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.” Charity blog on Stack Overflow: “Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you” In which she talks about how the tech industry is an apprenticeship industry. Charity Majors in the Google Cloud Next 2024 Developer Keynote honeycomb.io blog: “How Time Series Databases Work—And Where They Don't” by Alex Vondrak honeycomb.io blog: “Why Observability Requires a Distributed Column Store” by Alex Vondrak Links from the post-interview chat CNCF Kubernetes Community Days (KCDs) CNCF Kubernetes Community Days (KCDs) on GitHub Julia Evans Blog Wizard Zines by Julia Evans “Help! I Have a Manager!” zine by Julia Evans Aja Hammerly aka “thagomizer” blog “The Toaster Parable” “Manager Toolkit: Manage The Person In Front Of You” “Manager Toolkit: Useful Manager Phrases for 1:1s” “Manager Toolkit: You Talk, I Type”  

In this episode of the Steering Engineering Podcast, we explore how emerging AI technologies, such as AI code assistants, are reshaping the landscape of software design and development. Our focus is on how engineers are transitioning from hands-on coding to roles that more closely resemble that of an engineering manager. We examine the implications of generative AI for software engineering education, on-the-job training, roles/responsibilities, and career development.Charity Majors is an operations and database engineer, “sometimes” engineering manager, author and CTO at Honeycomb. Charity was a production engineering manager at Facebook and spent several years working on Parse. She also spent several years at Linden Lab, working on the infrastructure and databases that power Second Life. Charity is the co-author of O'Reilly's Database Reliability Engineering and author of "Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence.” She loves free speech, free software, and single malt scotch.

Do you feel like you're flying blind when it comes to your software? In today's episode, we dive deep into the world of observability - it's not just monitoring on steroids, and we'll explain why. Our guest, Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, will break down the concept and how it's changing the game for developers. Get ready to hear about: Observability 1.0 vs. 2.0: Is your toolkit stuck in the past? We'll explore the evolution of this critical practice. AI in Debugging: Friend or foe? We'll discuss the role of AI in software analytics and why it won't solve all your problems (but can definitely help!). The Single Source of Truth: Tired of juggling metrics, logs, and traces? Honeycomb's approach might be the answer you've been looking for. Building a Boring Company: Forget ping pong tables and nap pods. We'll chat about why a well-run, functional company might be the key to long-term success. So buckle up, developers and ops folks! This episode is packed with insights to help you see your software like never before.   Find Startup Hustle Everywhere: https://gigb.co/l/YEh5   This episode is sponsored by Full Scale: https://fullscale.io   Visit the Honeycomb.io website:  https://www.honeycomb.io   Learn more about Charity Majors: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charity-majors    Sign up for the Startup Hustle newsletter: https://newsletter.startuphustle.xyz   Highlighted Discussion Points Observability in software development, its definition and evolution. 0:31 Software observability and analytics, AI's limitations in solving complex problems. 3:54 Challenges of creating a new market for software tools, particularly in selling to developers and overcoming resistance to change. 9:03 Challenges of building a successful tech company, particularly in sales and marketing. 14:35 Leadership, sales, and transparency in a startup. 19:24 Leadership, growth, and prioritizing a well-run company over a "fun" one. 24:46 Honeycomb's product development and future plans, including new features and architecture improvements. 29:17 Observability in software development with Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb. 33:21  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on Screaming in the Cloud, Corey is joined by good friend and colleague, Charity Majors. Charity is the CTO and Co-founder of Honeycomb.io, the widely popular observability platform. Corey and Charity discuss the ins and outs of observability 1.0 vs. 2.0, why you should never underestimate the power of software to get worse over time, and the hidden costs of observability that could be plaguing your monthly bill right now. The pair also shares secrets on why speeches get better the more you give them and the basic role they hope AI plays in the future of computing. Check it out!Show Highlights:(00:00 - Reuniting with Charity Majors: A Warm Welcome(03:47) - Navigating the Observability Landscape: From 1.0 to 2.0(04:19) - The Evolution of Observability and Its Impact(05:46) - The Technical and Cultural Shift to Observability 2.0(10:34) - The Log Dilemma: Balancing Cost and Utility(15:21) - The Cost Crisis in Observability(22:39) - The Future of Observability and AI's Role(26:41) - The Challenge of Modern Observability Tools(29:05) - Simplifying Observability for the Modern Developer(30:42) - Final Thoughts and Where to Find MoreAbout CharityCharity is an ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io. Before this she worked at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab on infrastructure and developer tools, and always seemed to wind up running the databases. She is the co-author of O'Reilly's Database Reliability Engineering, and loves free speech, free software, and single malt scotch.Links:https://charity.wtf/Honeycomb Blog: https://www.honeycomb.io/blogTwitter: @mipsytipsy

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework for collecting and managing telemetry data. OpenTelemetry has been more successful than expected, becoming the second fastest growing project in the CNCF. It allows for flexibility and avoids vendor lock-in, making it attractive to startups and large enterprises alike. On today's show, Eric (@ericmander) sits down with Austin Parker (@austinlparker), director of open-source at Honeycomb. Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications! In this episode we discuss: How Austin's interest in complex systems led him to the observability field and developer relations An X argument that contributed to the merger of OpenTelemetry and OpenCensus Why foundations help maintainers to strike a balance with their contributors Austin's opinion on the secret to OpenTelemetry's success Links: OpenTelemetry Honeycomb People mentioned: Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) Christine Yen (@cyen)

How can you gain deeper insights into your complex systems beyond just monitoring infrastructure health metrics? Join us as Charity Majors, CTO and Co-Founder of Honeycomb, challenges traditional approaches to observability. With experience from the infrastructure trenches of fast-growing startups, Charity pushes us to rethink our methods.Can high-cardinality data exploration reveal the "unknown unknowns" hiding in your telemetry? Is prioritizing user experiences over infrastructure stats the key to untangling your "hairball" systems? And what role should observability play across the full software development lifecycle? Charity offers a forward-looking perspective on evolving observability practices to match increasing complexity. Observe the future of observability - Tune in to our latest episode now!‍Charity Majors is a Co-Founder and Engineer at Honeycomb.io, a startup that blends the speed of time series with the raw power of rich events to give you interactive, iterative debugging of complex systems. She has worked at companies like Facebook, Parse, and Linden Lab, as a systems engineer and engineering manager, but always seems to end up responsible for the databases too. She loves free speech, free software and a nice peaty single malt.Sponsored by: https://www.env0.com/

Honeycomb.io co-founder and CTO Charity Majors joins Allen to share what she's learned growing Honeycomb from idea to 170-person distributed company, including what goes into being a good manager beyond supporting your reports, how to build a team that feels supportive and safe while still keeping boundaries and limits, systems thinking for teams and cultures, the difference between generic company values and ones that take a stand, and why having a healthy culture is more important than having a novel one. Charity's blog, charity.wtf The Honeycomb.io engineering blog Emily Nakashima on the Honeycomb blog: On Becoming a VP of Engineering Have feedback for the show? Send us an email or reach out on Twitter. It Shipped That Way is brought to you by Steamclock Software.

Matt and Charity talk about Friday Deploys and try to answer the question "do we need them?"This season of YAGNI was made possible by our friends at Flipper Cloud - Are big launches stressing you out? Then you need feature flags! Flipper Cloud helps your team deploy the code now and then roll out features when you're good and ready. Get started for free at flippercloud.ioCharity Majors on Twitter // honeycomb.ioMatt Swanson on Twitter // arrows.toFriday deploy freezes are exactly like murdering puppiesCoaching treeFrequency Reduces Difficulty (Martin Fowler)Payoff space vs consistency spaceBlame-aware postmortemDORA metrics

What is observability engineering, and why do you need some? While at NDC in Porto, Carl and Richard recorded a .NET Rocks Live with Charity Majors, one of the founders of Honeycomb. Charity talked about her experiences trying to understand how complex applications worked and failed at scale over her years of experience at Facebook and other companies. Ultimately, those experiences led to a book and the creation of Honeycomb. Lots of fun insight from someone who has fought the good fight - and some great questions from the audience!

What is observability engineering, and why do you need some? While at NDC in Porto, Carl and Richard recorded a .NET Rocks Live with Charity Majors, one of the founders of Honeycomb. Charity talked about her experiences trying to understand how complex applications worked and failed at scale over her years of experience at Facebook and other companies. Ultimately, those experiences led to a book and the creation of Honeycomb. Lots of fun insight from someone who has fought the good fight - and some great questions from the audience!This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5634793/advertisement

Hosts Will Larry and Victoria Guido talk with Lonni Kieffer, Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at SmartCert. SmartCert's mission is to digitize and streamline the certificate transfer process in supply chains, mainly focusing on the aerospace industry. Lonni shares insights into the challenges of managing change within traditional industries, the importance of building a solid foundation of leadership and core values, and SmartCert's strategies for customer success and self-service. Lonni also shares the history of the company's growth and its focus on vendor accountability and internal processes to increase supply chain efficiency. SmartCert's platform offers features like document verification and digital signatures to facilitate accessible communication among teams. She discusses the role of their partner company, TechFabric, in building their MVP and how they've grown their internal team. She also highlights 2024 as a pivotal year for SmartCert, aiming for a global impact within the next five years. Regarding advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, Lonni emphasizes the importance of grit, flexibility, and a strong belief in one's mission. She also talks about the value of relationships in business growth and the critical role of sleep for effective functioning and decision-making. SmartCert (https://www.smartcert.tech/) TechFabric (https://techfabric.com/) Follow SmartCert on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/aramid/) or X (https://twitter.com/smartcert_tech). Follow Lonni Kieffer on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lonnik/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Lonni Kieffer, Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at SmartCert, a universal cloud-based platform that simplifies every aspect of cert transfer. Lonni, thank you for joining me. LONNI: Thanks so much for having me. I love what you guys do. And I'm excited to contribute to the conversation. VICTORIA: Wonderful. Well, we like to warm up a little bit first before we dive into business topics. Anything exciting going on in your world, Will or Lonni? LONNI: I'll let Will start. WILL: It's funny because, with three small kids, I think we're finally starting to find our rhythm and our routine, so that's kind of exciting. I know it sounds boring, but when you have three small kids, routine, I feel like, is everything. We're starting to find that because a couple of weeks ago, my son had surgery. So, it threw all of our routines off and everything, and trying to help him get better and heal and everything. But now he's doing good. He's back running around, having fun. So yeah, getting back to that normal life it's exciting, and we're looking forward to it. LONNI: That makes so much sense. And I'm glad you mentioned kids because [laughs] I was also going to talk about my three kids and the fact that I am headed down to a family weekend tomorrow to join two-thirds of my daughters for a fun activity. It usually involves some fun meals, grocery shopping to fill [laughs] small college dorm refrigerators. But the challenge that I have then...Will, you have the young ones, and I have the older ones that are definitely going to keep me on my toes. I don't know that I can keep up with college life so much. So, usually, this is really fun but also really exhausting [laughs]. WILL: I promise you, they're looking forward to it, so don't underestimate what you're doing [laughs]. LONNI: [chuckles] Yes, for sure. VICTORIA: I'm going to feel bad with my update [laughs]. It's like, oh, I'm surfing. I think I was in a surf film yesterday on accident, which was pretty funny. And then I'm going to surf this afternoon and climb. Which you're talking about being on a routine and I just...I can't seem to get my routine of when I'm surfing or when I'm climbing figured out to the point where I just keep, like, exhausting myself trying to do both [laughs]. But that's what's going on in my world. But I am not quite on the kids and baby train yet. But it does sound fun. It sounds...it encompasses a lot. And then you get to just experience a different time of their life compared to what you're going through. WILL: Yeah, don't feel bad talking about something else, and fun. Like, today, I signed up for a kickball league in my area. So, I'm looking forward to it. So, I have those activities also. That's a must, I feel. LONNI: That's so true, any kind of outdoor time. Even just reading about all the statistics now about direct sunlight, I think it's so incredibly important to weave that into the day. So, Victoria, I give you mad props for having a full agenda of those [laughs] activities. VICTORIA: That's good. I'm glad to hear you're having some fun, too, Will and Lonni, getting out there, getting outside in the sunshine while it's still here. Yeah, I appreciate that. So, I'm curious...you know, that's what humans do best, right? Like humans, we're supposed to be outside. We're supposed to be, like, enjoying the sunshine. We're not supposed to be managing paperwork every day [laughs]. So, could you tell me a little bit more about SmartCert and the mission behind the company? LONNI: For sure. The paperwork side is truly sad. I was having a discussion with a customer yesterday, and they still receive 90% of the product certs as paper from their vendors. And if you imagine not only the time that it takes to use paper these days [laughs] but the cost associated with that, I think there's some painful statistics around the fact that companies spend on average almost $500 a day on paper and toner. And, you know, our goal started three years ago when the founder, Lyndon Lattie, who had spent 20 years in manufacturing and distribution in aerospace, finally decided to quit his perfectly good job and really work on alleviating a lot of the bottlenecks and hurdles that's really prevalent in supply chains. Every little nut and bolt that goes into an aircraft requires a lot of documentation that provides traceability to acknowledge that these parts meet the standards that the industry holds that we all have confidence in. So, when there isn't a paper trail or documents go missing, things get very expensive and chaotic. And what we're trying to do is really remove paper [laughs], the physical part of it, from the equation and use the cloud to not only receive documents from suppliers but store them and send them on to customers. So, we're not only speeding things up, but we're also checking the box on sustainability and helping a fairly antiquated industry move forward with innovation and technology. WILL: I love that idea because I'm the type of person that I don't use journals or things like that or paper to-do lists because I lose them all. And I like to think I'm a fairly responsible person, and I still lose them all. I love having it on my phone because I know exactly where it's at. 9.9 times out of 10, I have my phone with me. So, when I think of an idea, I have it; I can do something on it. In your experience, I don't know if you have this number or if you can estimate how often does paper certifications go missing, do you think? LONNI: We're talking to some big, big aerospace companies these days, and they have estimated on a daily basis that 80 to 100 shipments have paperwork problems. So, when you think about the sheer volume on a daily basis and the time that it requires to really enable teams to track down paperwork, sometimes you go to your vendor and ask for the documentation, and they have to go back in time because they don't have it. Those delays can halt manufacturing and certainly make a big impact on profitability and just the ability to do business. VICTORIA: Right. And from my background working in the federal government space for a while, I have a sense of just how many rules and regulations a particular product might have applied to it. And thinking about, like, the aerospace where, like, down to the individual bolts and nuts have to have all the specifications and the documentation of, like, the size, and where it came from, and the materials. And if you lose that, then you can't...it's, like, you can't work, or you have to go back to a manufacturer. So, how does SmartCert start to solve that issue? LONNI: One of the big things that we're focused on this year is making it easier to receive documents from suppliers. It's the one place that a lot of companies don't have control over. You could have a strong internal process. You could have a strong process for sending these documents to your customers, but you're still at the mercy of what your suppliers choose to do. Our big focus this year is starting with vendor accountability and starting to be able to compile data around vendor performance with documents but also start to create a more standard receiving process. So, next month, we are launching a new feature where you could take an email or a digital document, even if you do have to scan it in from a supplier and add that all to your shared dashboard. And the idea here is to create a strong internal process instead of being at the mercy of your vendors but also make things work faster once documents are received. Usually, that effort is pretty siloed, where there's one receiving team, the processing and review team. The quality team is waiting for the documents. When you start to give everyone access to documents as they're received, you certainly can see cutting down on the steps and fostering stronger communication among internal teams. So, because you now have a good repository and time and date-stamped information, you can start to see the vendors that are costing you money, have the conversations ahead of contracts. There's a big focus on vendor scorecards and continuous improvement in the industry. So, our goal is to be able to provide that centralized repository where the data comes to life instead of multiple people receiving certs and processing certs. That's one big focus on the receiving side. And then, from an internal perspective, we've built the tools in SmartCert that enable the teams, once the documents are received, to quickly search in the document, make sure that the information is included and accurate. If it is, they can digitally sign and approve it, which is a common next step. If there is information missing, they can reject those certs and kind of maintain the communication within the same platform instead of going into an email and waiting on when to provide updated documents. We're focused on, again, keeping the conversation within one platform. And then, on the customer side, it's the same thing: the traceability, the visibility of sending documents. So many companies are at the mercy of customers losing paperwork or asking them to resend it. And those are the things that we've eliminated by providing dashboard-to-dashboard delivery and that centralized access. So, even if the buyer you work with is on vacation, your certs aren't sitting in an email inbox for the next five days, not being accessible to the rest of the team. So, those kinds of, I think, focuses on efficiency all the way through the process are where we really feel will make a big impact for every company, large and small. WILL: So, I know in the past you started multiple companies, and then about four years ago, you started SmartCert. So, how was the beginning getting traction for SmartCert? And were there any benefits to being a founder in the past that helped you with SmartCert? LONNI: I love that question. My efforts at entrepreneurship certainly help. You know, you recognize that the ball's in your court in every facet of the business, the hats that you have to wear across everything you do and want to accomplish. It helped provide a good foundation. SmartCert certainly is more daunting and bigger than my past experiences. But having a good understanding of the requirements around flexibility, a willingness to figure things out on the fly, and a real confidence in what we're doing and believing in is so important. You know, we are working to convince hundreds of thousands of companies to finally move away from super manual processes. And I think you have to have a lot of confidence and belief in not only what you're doing but the impact that you can make in order for you to keep going. And recognize if you are a new product in a new category, the path to building growth is usually pretty difficult. WILL: If there is someone who is thinking about starting a company, what advice would you give them? Because I know it's not easy to start a company. It's hard, let's just be honest, it's very hard. If you can give someone advice on, "Hey, take that next step, start it," what advice would you give them? LONNI: Well, I think you have to have the grit to get through the bad days. It is an insane roller coaster. But, for me, I think there are so many books and advice, and formulas out there for starting a business. You know, we've read every single book out there. And I think intuition is such a big piece of the potential and success for a business. While formulas and successful companies and what they share and how they did it is really helpful, I think at the end of the day, there may be moments that give you pause because it doesn't align with your intuition. And I think you really have to pay attention to those. So, we spent all of 2022 really working on the SaaS formula. We aligned our website and our conversations to fit those kinds of meetings and conversations. And it turns out because of the people we were talking to and the challenge with change management in this level of transition, the SaaS formula was not successful for us. We made a decision at the end of 2022 to move towards product-led growth, having about 1,000 companies. I hope that'll be next week—our big magic, fun, new milestone. We're really looking to empower the companies who are already participating on the network to drive growth. Many of them are receiving certs from our paying customers and just starting to get familiar with a new way of doing business. But things last year didn't feel right. It was incredibly frustrating to go through those motions and not have the success and metrics that were expected. The piece about intuition and being bold enough and confident enough in why you're doing what you're doing to be able to pivot is crucial. VICTORIA: So, you've talked to...or have over 1,000 customers. I wonder what was anything really surprising to you that you discovered in that process. LONNI: I think for us...and it kind of lends itself to the conversations we were having last year. To us and to our early adopters, SmartCert was a no-brainer. People that were spending eight hours a day were now spending an hour a day on the same work but just doing it much faster, reducing a lot of human error and automating so much of it. So, when we did have the conversations and make, you know, the introductions to the industry and work to build awareness, it was very obvious that change management is a paralyzing [laughs] aspect. And when technology is rearing its ugly head in the requirements for your business, the future of your business, I think for manufacturing and distribution, the timeline for a lot of that movement towards digital documents and working in the cloud was accelerated with COVID, with inflation. And all of a sudden, now there's companies who are leaping ahead and some that are falling behind. And it's now a requirement to prioritize more efficient processes simply because there's less people to do the work. And the companies who are taking advantage of innovation are really maximizing the opportunities to build their business, get more customers, and have more success. WILL: I was looking at your team, and it looks like you brought on the head of technology, I think, in 2022. And so, I think it was you and your co-founder in the very early days. How was it as a founder to build a technical app and going through that process? How was that process for you? LONNI: We were so lucky to partner with a local company in building out the MVP of SmartCert. They had an amazing team. They helped us bring to life a lot of Lyndon's ideas and also had a good background in supply chain. So, I always give props to TechFabric in Gilbert, Arizona, for giving us the opportunity to prove out the model. And that was then enabling us to get the funding and higher Mark who, I will say, every day I don't know how we became so lucky. I think startup life is challenging in and of itself. But he really embraced the mission and the opportunity to rebuild SmartCert from the ground up for the scalability it requires but to also embrace the security aspects that are coming to the industry, those compliance requirements, and working alongside us. He's one of the few, I think, heads of technology that are involved in a lot of conversations with customers. And we are absolutely so lucky to be able to add him to our team and continue to evolve the platform in all the ways it needs to to accommodate what we're trying to achieve. VICTORIA: Thank you for sharing that. I wonder, what does success really look like for you now, or six months from now, maybe even five years from now? LONNI: It'll be three years that we have launched SmartCert in March. And when we think about, you know, what's the first thing to prove when you're a new product in a new market, and it's to prove that people are willing to pay to alleviate the pain. And I think we've done a good job doing that. It's building virality now, you know. As the industry is now expanding its use of SmartCert, more companies are participating. So, we've built a good foundation, which has allowed us to start working with some of the global aerospace companies, distributors, and contract manufacturers, and pilots. We're defining those opportunities now. And I think 2024 will be a really big year for us to expand the features and the usage and adoption not only with additional supply chains but much more fast-paced growth with participating companies so that in five years, we could really look back and say, "We have really supported supply chains all over the world in working smarter, approaching sustainability with the right goals and processes to cut down on paper, and also be able to combat the challenges with labor shortages, apply technology in ways that are going to certainly make sense for them and for the future." VICTORIA: I like that you tie in business goals with, like, big, dreamy goals, like, really reducing our impact on the planet and things like that. Because I think that's...you need to have something to come back to at the end of the day when you're working really hard in a startup like this. LONNI: We had a really fun exercise, an internal exercise. So, our lead investor, TitletownTech, obviously has entrepreneurs in residence that we had the advantage of working with. We went through an exercise of really trying to articulate what is, like, the big, hairy goal? What is our mission? And our tagline is now taking the paper and the work out of paperwork so humans can do what they do best. MID-ROLL AD: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it's easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn't looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 support from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: tbot.io/devops. WILL: You were talking about the exercise to figure out, like, where your company is going. I want to ask question, like, around your leadership and core values. Like, how important is it for you to set that foundation now for the next couple of years? Because it sounds like that's what you're doing. You're setting that foundation, and I heard you say it a couple of times, foundation. So, how important is it to set that foundation for the growth that you're expecting over the next couple of years? LONNI: When you do have a product-led growth initiative, it means you need to provide as much self-service onboarding, and training tools, and resources as you can to make it easy for companies to move from their free account to a paid account and take advantage of all of the features and the functionality. So, our goals right now are to eliminate hurdles that companies may feel in making the transition. Because we've had so many conversations over the past, I guess, almost three years, we're pretty articulate on being able to help with process changes. What are you doing now? Here's how SmartCert fits in. Are your goals on the supplier side or your internal organization? Is it with customers? And just help walk them down the path of making a transition so it doesn't feel like it's going to require months or years or tons of man-hours that just aren't available as people just try and get through the day. So, from a foundational perspective, customer success is really now sales, marketing support. And those are the tools that I think will help companies have a clear path. We've learned that they really want to make very clear decisions. If I do this, what are the steps? So, we're providing clarity and a lot of good guidance that doesn't require a lot of man-hours on our side to be able to help turn free accounts into paid accounts and continue their expanded use of the platform. VICTORIA: That's very cool. Do you have any questions for me or Will? LONNI: So, you guys have a lot of conversations. I would love to hear what's really stood out in the last month or so. What's kind of resonated with you? Or what did you hear and apply in your life? VICTORIA: I have a couple of answers. I mean, I've had a lot of really amazing guests on the show. It's hard to pick out any few that were really important or had some meaningful takeaways. I really liked Charity Majors when I asked her how the company is doing, and she's like, "Well, we haven't failed yet." [laughs] And just an interesting mentality of very humble and very just open to change and open to seeing, like, what's going to happen next. And also, I think that Irina Nazarova talked about managing products versus managing open-source projects, and how that is different, and how it might influence your business differently, especially as a consulting company. So, I thought that was really interesting. I always love having guests on the show and hearing about why they started what they're doing. And it's just really inspiring to hear people take a chance on an idea that they have, that they feel passionate about, and really put everything behind it. And, you know, most of the time, we're talking to people who have succeeded [chuckles]. A few guests we've had are just getting started in their journey, and it is still kind of unclear. And I really enjoy those conversations as well, where they're just still not really sure if it's going to work. So, that's been a little bit about my experience as a host on the show. WILL: Yeah, I think I was going to go in a similar direction because I love talking to founders because it's just a different...almost like what you said, like, it's okay; go out there. Take that next step. It may hurt. It may be hard. It's not an easy path but go out there. You can do it. And it's not just for starting a company; for me, it's almost everyday life, like the hard things that come my way in life. Like, it's okay; I can do it. So, I think it's very encouraging to hear founders and their mindset when they started companies and after, like, multiple years of where they're at. And, like, yeah, it was hard. It was not easy, but hey, I made it. Like, I'm on the other side of it. And we're doing great, or we're still in there just hanging out. So, I think, for me, it's being resilient. I think that's the big thing. LONNI: I think you nailed it because real talk is survival. And if you aren't honest with yourself, it's not likely you're going to be able to survive. So, I think when you take stock of what you're trying to achieve, the road is super hard, or, like, everyone says, "Everyone would be doing it." But there's a reason, and there's intention there. And there are so many entrepreneurs who have failed over time only to have more intelligence, experience to get it right at some point. So, I don't know that anything is linear these days. We get smarter and certainly savvier around topics that interest us. And if it drives you towards entrepreneurship, I salute you. It makes having three daughters feel like a spa treatment. But I also know that I get excited about the other side of this. But our board reminds me that there's so much of this that feeds my soul. And it's hard to give that up when you do sell the company or move on because you're used to just being involved in all the things and being able to take advantage of the highs and come together during the lows. And that roller coaster is actually what everyone tells me I'm going to miss the most. I don't believe them yet. But [laughs] I think that they're probably right. VICTORIA: I think maybe you'll have a nostalgia for it. But you'll enjoy your peacefulness as well. LONNI: Yeah [laughs]. VICTORIA: Hopefully. [laughs] You have to hope. Yeah, I wonder, you know, speaking about, like, having investors and going around trying to raise money for a product, did you receive any advice or suggestions that, looking back on, you were like, "Actually, that was completely not helpful; I'm glad I didn't take it"? LONNI: There were many companies who declined to participate in conversations because we were not building SmartCert on blockchain. And some of them have come back around and asked, "Are your plans to include it?" And we've always felt not only does that require a huge leap...We're taking an industry from paper to digital, so if you want to layer blockchain on that, you're probably going to go nowhere really fast. Because I don't think there's anyone on this planet who can explain it well or really articulate the benefits when, in fact, you're sending paper in boxes. And, sure, there's the security element to that, but it's not really aligned with what blockchain is meant to do. So, we kind of have a laugh now about those that pushed so hard for we will only fund if this is blockchain-enabled. And we're so glad we didn't do that [laughs]. VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean, my understanding for, like, a blockchain, one good use case might be for, like, unique identities or something. Taking the more practical approach, sometimes I think people forget in technology that we're just...the future is here, but it's not evenly distributed. And there is paper being sent in boxes. And sometimes we can make a big impact, which is very simple solutions. But even simple solutions aren't simple to implement and make change happen. So, I'm wondering if you have any advice for founders who are facing a big change management that they're trying to push through. What advice would you give them to kind of start making inroads into that? LONNI: There are companies who make hundreds of millions of dollars helping [laughs] other companies through change management, and it's not lost on me that it's its own business. What we have really come to understand is you need to meet everyone where they're at. The tools that we've built are simple. You learn SmartCert in five minutes. It is how processes change that have been in place since the beginning of time for this company. And I think when it comes down to it, there are plenty of business owners and C-suite executives that can say, "Yes, this makes sense. We're going to do it." But being voluntold as the user who needs to not only learn something new but move out of their comfort zone figure out how to learn while doing your job every day, those are the people that I really think is important to support. They're going to mean the success of the adoption. And they are the ones that deserve the cheerleading. So, with change management, my advice would be is to think about every single person that this affects in the company, understand who is able to realize immediate benefits, whose are maybe more short-term once this is launched or as your customers adopt it. And then who benefits, and how do they benefit for the long-term? Because you sort of need to help them keep their eye on the prize to get through the steps, it's going to require to change the way they show up every day. WILL: So, Victoria asked you about advice that you're glad that you didn't take. Was there any advice that you're like, "Wow, that was the best advice, and I am so glad that we did follow it"? LONNI: Towards the end of last year when, we sort of accepted our fate that standard sales, SaaS sales, was not going to work for us. Lyndon, the founder and one of the members of our board, had a really great conversation around relationships, especially with these antiquated industries. And if you are new technology, the real key to winning business, sort of earning that street cred, being accepted as a thought leader, is to make relationships with people. It is still a person-to-person decision that helped us prioritize attending regional conferences and industry conferences to meet people face to face as often as possible to build the trust and to be able to build the relationships that will help create the confidence in every company we talk to about moving forward but making sure that there's still a human element involved. WILL: I love that advice. Yeah, it's interesting how many companies, I feel like, forget that, is that the people is the reason that your company exists. I don't know where I got it from, but someone told me it's three Ps that, like, what is kind of the foundation for your company. I think it's people, processes, and products. If you can nail those three things, like you will be successful majority of the time. And I thought that was very interesting. LONNI: It's so true. Empowering people and accepting the challenges that they face, being real about what change means for them, being able to, you know, speak their language, and acknowledge what taking on new commitments and new processes means for them is going to be the way to be successful. VICTORIA: And how does your balance feel between your life and your family, that you've mentioned, and working for this company trying to get it off the ground? LONNI: There are times where I'm proud being able to show my daughters that you can do it all, but it's hard to do it all. I'm grateful to work from home because it does enable me to not only work in yoga pants all day but to have time for self-care. So, the endorphins at the gym are survival for me. Being able to find your people...I was so lucky to be a part of StartupAZ, which is a cohort here in Arizona of just about a dozen companies. And we got together on a monthly basis to talk through what's working, what's not working, sort of setting goals for ourselves but also commiserating. Because I feel like being an entrepreneur can feel really isolating. I don't think there's many people that understand what this means on a daily basis. There's certainly a whole new language beyond that with tech founders. And it helped me feel seen in a way that I can't articulate or get from my friends. So, that was really important for me. What I try and be really sensitive to is this is a grind, but I'm doing it on behalf of my family. So, prioritizing time, even if it's, well, you know what? I'm going to drive you to school because that means I get 10 minutes in the car one one-on-one with you. Those are the things that I think if you're going to have less time, find ways to make it more meaningful without screens and phones, and just connect to your people. That's been important to me. There are days that I'm better at it. This week has not been great simply because we have some big deadlines. And I do still try and prioritize things like the gym simply because my brain works so much better with [chuckles] endorphins than without. So, you'll have parental guilt. But if you really remind yourself that you're showing up for the greater good and you're doing it for your people, then your people will still always be in the forefront. WILL: Do you have any foreseeable hurdles coming up with SmartCert? LONNI: This is a big year for us. We, as many tech companies, have worked really hard to extend our runway. The funding [chuckles] world, the milestones, and markers required for a Series A round have all changed a lot since we were funded. And I think the hurdles we face is to demonstrate enough of momentum, great outcomes with our pilots, with these larger companies, to be able to go back to our investors and expand the future with the funding we'll need to continue to scale. So, that's probably a consistent point of view for a lot of tech companies. It's sort of that make-or-break year. But we feel pretty good about it certainly because of the changes we've made to the way we go to market, but also the features we released this year in support of these larger conversations and being able to bring on someone who's going to then have 2,400 of their suppliers join the network. So, there's a lot of potential, but there's also a lot at risk. VICTORIA: Yeah. So, I'm curious how that process was when you decided to pivot and you decided to create some new features to meet what your customers were telling you. How did you go about getting the support you needed to build those features? LONNI: One thing that I think we did okay at, but if I had to look back, I'd say we should have done more of, is talking to the companies represented on SmartCert, certainly our paid customers. But those conversations helped us prioritize the features that would enable them to work smarter, to reduce risk, to be more efficient, to grow in a way that's going to support and embrace technology as it's introduced to the industry. So, when you think back to what can you learn, it should always be the people that are using your product. We have, in this year, created a lot of internal tools so that once you do receive documents, or if you're a manufacturer and you're generating documents, centralizing those for access among teams, and creating a really automated process to send those to customers was the focus. And the conversation now has moved, as I mentioned, to the supplier side. And that's one area where I think we have the greatest opportunity for growth simply because it is the one area of the business you have the least control over. So, we've kind of come full circle with building the tools that make sense for those that are using it now and building a new path to participate on a network or create efficiencies by making standard processes. Even if your suppliers aren't participating on SmartCert, we are going to be launching the ability to take the documents, as I mentioned, and turn them into SmartCerts. That, to me, I think presents the greatest opportunity for us to really build a lot of momentum. VICTORIA: I love that. And so, you have your own team of developers working on this. Are you working with, like, an outsourced team? Or how did you structure the type of technical skills you needed to bring into the team? LONNI: Our partner company that built our MVP, TechFabric, is still connected with us. So, if we have integrations, their team usually assists us with those SmartCert integrations into things like ERPs and just legacy systems that our customers are using. What they helped us with is to kind of provide the ideal candidate framework based on their knowledge of not only where the platform needs to go but the requirements and capabilities it requires, and participated in interviews to help us build our internal team. So, without having leadership in technology, that was a huge win for us to have an advisor and a supporter to be able to have the conversations we weren't qualified to have in order to hire the right people. VICTORIA: Gotcha. That makes sense. And maybe I missed this point earlier. But how did you meet them, or how did you find them? LONNI: Well, the story is a good one. We're based in Gilbert, Arizona. And as we were exploring what the options were, obviously trying to prioritize local relationships and partnerships, we did a Google search and ended up just having great conversations and feeling very fortunate that they were in our backyard and still are a really strong partner. VICTORIA: Oh, that makes sense. And having someone nearby, too, probably helps to just make it all feel a little cozier, so I love that. I love hearing about it and that they've helped you get to a place you want to be with the app. I'm so grateful to hear your story and hear more about what y'all are working on. Is there anything else that you would like to promote? LONNI: It's always fun having these conversations because sometimes you forget, you know, you're stuck in the minutiae of the day-to-day. And I just appreciate being able to tell the story and be reminded of how far we've come. And certainly celebrate and challenge anyone else who's considering a [inaudible 41:24] at this to take it. And if there's any advice that I would want to leave everyone with is to prioritize sleep [laughs] because it's the secret weapon. And I can tell that the days that I don't get enough, I don't think the way that I should. And it's almost like sleep is the new drug. And find any way possible, whether it's white noise, CBD, black-out shades, find your peace because sleep is your friend. WILL: I totally agree with that. [chuckles] VICTORIA: Thank you so much for your time and for being here with us today. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you could find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions. Special Guest: Lonni Kieffer.

In this episode, I spoke with Charity Majors, who is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, a popular observability platform.We had a wide-ranging conversation about Parse (and its acquisition by Facebook), observability, devops and why you should deploy on Fridays (but you still need to apply good engineering sense!).Links from the episode:Honeycomb Honeycomb blogHoneycomb's AI-powered query assistantOpenTelemetryYou can find Charity on X as @mipsytipsy.-----For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please subscribe to the channel and follow me on X as @theburningmonk.And if you're hungry for more insights, best practices, and invaluable tips on building serverless apps, make sure to subscribe to our free newsletter and elevate your serverless game! https://theburningmonk.com/subscribeOpening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

MY guest today is Charity Major and we are talking all about the power of being in the room. Charity is an author, inspirational speaker, and founder that has empowered over 1000 women, all around the world, to step into their greatest potential, grow their confidence, align with their purpose so they can grow their income, increase their influence and make a major impact.   Here are three key takeaways from this episode: 1️⃣ Connection over Content: We discuss the importance of building genuine connections with your audience and how it can have a greater impact than simply delivering amazing content.  2️⃣ The Power of Authenticity: Our guest, Charity Majors, shares her insights on showing up as your authentic self. We explore how being true to yourself can help you build meaningful relationships and attract the right people to your community. 3️⃣ Events in 2024: Get ready for a glimpse into the future! We discuss the evolving landscape of events and how they will continue to shape the business world in the coming years.    [00:00:00] Connection over content. [00:03:27] Real vs. Fake Plants. [00:08:07] Authenticity in community building. [00:09:33] Collaboration over competition [00:12:25] Unity and conflict in relationships. [00:17:14] The future of the event space. [00:19:22] Connection over content in events. [00:22:39] Journeying through grief and healing. [00:25:39] Selling unapologetically.   CONNECT WITH JILLIAN Follow me: @thejillianmurphy Visit my website: thejillianmurphy.com Join my Free Facebook Community: https://bit.ly/sellingsecretsgroup Join the Sales Queen Collective: https://bit.ly/sqcollective

In this inspiring episode, we sit down with Charity, a dynamic entrepreneur on a mission to make a difference. She's not just building a business; she's building a community of empowered women who know their worth.Charity shares her journey, highlighting the challenges and triumphs she's encountered. Her story is a testament to the power of resilience and determination in adversity.But Charity's mission goes beyond her own success. She's passionate about lifting other women up in the world of business. Through mentorship and support, she's helping women discover their potential, find their voices, and step confidently into the entrepreneurial arena.Tune in to hear Charity's insights on the importance of community, self-worth, and the role of women in business!Charity's Details CharityMajors.com  |  Charity@CharityMajors.comWeAreMeantForMore.com  |  BusinessAndBubbly.comShare Your Story on the Show!The Host's Email

Today I interview author, speaker and founder Charity Majors.We talk about:How she went from being a girl hiding in the corner to a leader with confidenceHow to find your authentic self to become the leader you were meant to beHow to own your voice even in the face of criticismHow to ask better questions to find your unique messageHow to develop unshakeable confidence in businessCharity Majors is an author, inspirational speaker, and founder that has empowered over 1000 women, all around the world, to step into their greatest potential, grow their confidence, align with their purpose so they can grow their income, increase their influence and make a major impact.After struggling with limiting beliefs and journeying through the loss of a child, Charity was given the gift of unshakable confidence that we are all here on purpose, for a purpose. With this belief(along with the tools she learned along the way), she equips others to unlock their purpose and step unapologetically into who they are meant to be and how they are meant to live out their destiny.She is a former TV host, founder of Business & Bubbly, a nation-wide networking group for women in business, Founder of Meant For More Ministries, she's the host to the popular "Meant For More" Podcast, author to the #1 New Release/#2 Best Seller, "Meant For More; Igniting Your Purpose in a World That Tries to Dim Your Light," and has been speaking, training, and facilitating transformational events & building community for over 15 years.www.charitymajors.com / @charitymajorswww.charitymajors.com/media-proposalRegister for Jennifer's FREE workshop on Sept. 21st at 12:30pm PST"3 Simple Steps to Master Your Mindset so you can sign dream clients on repeat!"I hope you can join live but if not there will be a replay available.Here is the link!https://bit.ly/3MYMJoin my weekly Coffee Chat every Thursday at 12pm PST by signing up for free HERE.

Hey friend, I see you over there- You've got one earbud in listening to this podcast while you multitask picking up the kids, cleaning the house or walking the dog. You clicked play cuz you're kinda curious as to how in the world you could know you're meant for more than just surviving the day with all that's on your plate...let alone have permission to go after it with all the demands and distractions on your time. If that's you and you're not sure this #meantformore thing is even possible cuz your life is REALLY BUSY… Can I just say, your next best step is to join the REDEEM Her Time Coaching Program, where not only will we help you get clear on what you're called to in this season, but then take the next step to make the time to go after it, even with all that life holds. And I've extended the FALLYALL SALE through Monday, Sept 4th so you can still snag $100 OFF lifetime access, plus get invited to the private community + live coaching support and take advantage of the TIME BLOCK REVIEW BONUS…but once Labor Day is over, so is summer…and so is this sale. Head over to redeemhertime.com/coaching for all the details and to grab a spot right away with code FALLYALL I guarantee, you'll be so glad you did, especially since you'll be inspired that you really are meant for more with today's guest, Charity Majors...Charity is an author, inspirational speaker, and founder that has empowered over 1000 women, all around the world, to step into their greatest potential, grow their confidence, align with their purpose so they can grow their income, increase their influence and make a major impact.After struggling with limiting beliefs and journeying through the loss of a child, Charity was given the gift of unshakable confidence that we are all here on purpose, for a purpose. With this belief (along with the tools she learned along the way), she equips others to unlock their purpose and step unapologetically into who they are meant to be and how they are meant to live out their calling.She is a former TV host, Founder of Meant For More Ministries, she's the host to the popular "MeantFor More" Podcast, author and has been speaking, training, and facilitating transformational events & building community for over 15 years.Her favorite titles are “Babe” to her husband, Chris, and “Mama” to her son, Judah & daughter Eden. They call Boise, Idaho home while also taking Majors Adventures. She also is a recovering plant killer, she finds herself somewhere in the middle of the unforced rhythms of grace and pursuing the big God-sized dreams in her heart, while juggling #momlife, date night, girl time, and sitting at the feet of Jesus. One of her favorite days was when her and her family went to Africa and gave over 100 pairs of shoes to orphans and children's centers. Talk about making time for what matters…Connect with Charity (and download the poem she shared) at https://charitymajors.com/meantformoreI pray this blesses, challenges and moves you to action!L.Y.L.A.S. (Love Ya Like A Sis)LissaP.S. Join the REDEEM Her Time Group Coaching Program and use code FALLYALL to get $100 OFF + all the BONUSES before Sept 4thVisit the REDEEM Her Time...

Hey friend, I see you over there- You've got one earbud in listening to this podcast while you multitask picking up the kids, cleaning the house or walking the dog. You clicked play cuz you're kinda curious as to how in the world you could know you're meant for more than just surviving the day with all that's on your plate...let alone have permission to go after it with all the demands and distractions on your time. If that's you and you're not sure this #meantformore thing is even possible cuz your life is REALLY BUSY… Can I just say, your next best step is to join the REDEEM Her Time Coaching Program, where not only will we help you get clear on what you're called to in this season, but then take the next step to make the time to go after it, even with all that life holds. And I've extended the FALLYALL SALE through Monday, Sept 4th so you can still snag $100 OFF lifetime access, plus get invited to the private community + live coaching support and take advantage of the TIME BLOCK REVIEW BONUS…but once Labor Day is over, so is summer…and so is this sale. Head over to redeemhertime.com/coaching for all the details and to grab a spot right away with code FALLYALL I guarantee, you'll be so glad you did, especially since you'll be inspired that you really are meant for more with today's guest, Charity Majors...Charity is an author, inspirational speaker, and founder that has empowered over 1000 women, all around the world, to step into their greatest potential, grow their confidence, align with their purpose so they can grow their income, increase their influence and make a major impact.After struggling with limiting beliefs and journeying through the loss of a child, Charity was given the gift of unshakable confidence that we are all here on purpose, for a purpose. With this belief (along with the tools she learned along the way), she equips others to unlock their purpose and step unapologetically into who they are meant to be and how they are meant to live out their calling.She is a former TV host, Founder of Meant For More Ministries, she's the host to the popular "MeantFor More" Podcast, author and has been speaking, training, and facilitating transformational events & building community for over 15 years.Her favorite titles are “Babe” to her husband, Chris, and “Mama” to her son, Judah & daughter Eden. They call Boise, Idaho home while also taking Majors Adventures. She also is a recovering plant killer, she finds herself somewhere in the middle of the unforced rhythms of grace and pursuing the big God-sized dreams in her heart, while juggling #momlife, date night, girl time, and sitting at the feet of Jesus. One of her favorite days was when her and her family went to Africa and gave over 100 pairs of shoes to orphans and children's centers. Talk about making time for what matters…Connect with Charity (and download the poem she shared) at https://charitymajors.com/meantformoreI pray this blesses, challenges and moves you to action!L.Y.L.A.S. (Love Ya Like A Sis)LissaP.S. Join the REDEEM Her Time Group Coaching Program and use code FALLYALL to get $100 OFF + all the BONUSES before Sept 4thVisit the REDEEM Her Time...

Charity Majors is Co-Founder and CTO of Honeycomb, which provides full-stack observability that enables engineers to deeply understand and debug production software together. Victoria and Will talk to Charity about observability, her technical background and decision to start Honeycomb.io, thoughts about the whole ops SRE profession, and things that surprised her along her journey of building a company around observability as a concept. Honeycomb (https://www.honeycomb.io/) Follow Honeycomb on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/honeycombio), Twitter (https://twitter.com/honeycombio), Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCty8KGQ3oAP0MQQmLIv7k0Q), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/honeycomb.io/). Follow Charity Majors on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/charity-majors/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy), or visit her website (https://charity.wtf/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with us today is Charity Majors, Co-Founder and CTO of Honeycomb, which provides full-stack observability that enables engineers to deeply understand and debug production software together. Charity, thank you for joining us. How are you doing? CHARITY: Thanks for having me. I'm a little bit crunchy from a [laughs] long flight this morning. But I'm very happy to be home in San Francisco and happy to be talking to you. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And, Charity, I looked at your profile and noticed that you're a fan of whiskey. And I thought I might ask you just to get us started here, like, what's your favorite brand? CHARITY: Oh, goodness, that's like asking me to choose my favorite child if I had children. [laughter]. You know, I used to really be into the peaty scotches, the Islays, in particular. But lately, I've been more of a bourbon kick. Of course, everybody loves Pappy Van Winkle, George T. Stagg; impossible to find now, but it's so, so good. You know, if it's high-proof and single barrel, I will probably drink it. VICTORIA: That sounds great. Yeah, I tend to have the same approach. And, like, people ask me if I like it, and I like all of them. [laughter] I don't [inaudible 01:21] that I didn't like. [laughs] CHARITY: [inaudible 01:23] tongue sting? Then I'm in. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, [inaudible 01:26]. WILL: See, I'm the opposite. I want something smooth. I'm a fruity drink type of guy. I'm just going, to be honest. CHARITY: There's no shame in that. WILL: No shame here. [laughs] Give me a margarita, and you have a happy Will for life. [laughs] VICTORIA: We'll have to get you to come out and visit San Diego for some margaritas, Will. That's -- CHARITY: Oh yeah. VICTORIA: Yeah, it's the place to be. Yeah, we do more of a bourbon drink in our house, like bourbon soda. That's usually what we make, like, my own custom simple syrup, and mix it with a little bourbon and soda water. And that's what we do for a cool down at the end of the day sometimes, yeah. Well, awesome. Let's see. So, Charity, why don't you just tell me a little more about Honeycomb? What is it? CHARITY: Well, it's a startup that hasn't failed yet, so... [laughs] to my own shock. [laughs] We're still around seven and a half years in. And I say that just so much joking. Like, you're not really supposed to say this as a founder, but, like, I 100% thought we were going to fail from the beginning. But we haven't yet, and we just got more money. So we'll be around for a while. We kind of pioneered the whole concept of observability, which now doesn't really mean anything at all. Everybody and their mother is like, well, I do observability, too. But back when we started talking about it, it was kind of a little bit revolutionary, I guess in that, you know, we started talking about how important it is to have high cardinality data in your systems. You really can't debug without it. And the fact that our systems are getting just astronomically more complex, and yet, we're still trying to debug it with these tools based on, you know, the metric data type [laughs] defined since the '70s when space was incredibly rare and expensive. And now space is incredibly cheap, but we should be wasteful with it so we can understand our incredibly complex systems. So that's us. We really try to empower software engineers to own their own code in production. For a long time, it was like, all of the tools for you to understand your software were really written for low-level ops people because they speak the language of, like, RAM, and disks, and CPU, which you shouldn't have to understand that in order to be able to understand I just deployed something, what went wrong? WILL: I love the honesty because there are so many founders that I'll talk to, and I'm like, okay, you're very successful. But did you really expect this to be what it is today? Did you really expect to survive? Because, like, just some of their ideas, I'm like, it's brilliant, but if I was with you back in the day, I'd be like, it ain't going to work. It's not going to work. [laughs] CHARITY: Yeah. And I feel like the VC culture really encourages delusion, just, like, self-delusion, like, this delusive thinking. You're supposed to, like, broadcast just, like, rock-solid confidence in yourself and your ideas at all time. And I think that only sociopaths do that. [laughs] I don't want to work for anyone who's that confident in themselves or their idea. Because I'm showing my own stripes, I guess, you know, I'm a reliability engineer. I wake up in the morning; I'm like, what's wrong with the day? That's just how my brain works. But I feel like I would rather work with people who are constantly scanning the horizon and being like, okay, what's likely to kill us today? Instead of people who are just like, I am right. [laughs] You know? VICTORIA: Yeah. And I can relate that back to observability by thinking how, you know, you can have an idea about how your system is supposed to work, and then there's the way that it actually works. [laughs] CHARITY: Oh my God. VICTORIA: Right? CHARITY: Yes. It's so much that. VICTORIA: Maybe you can tell us just a little bit more about, like, what is observability? Or how would you explain that to someone who isn't necessarily in it every day? CHARITY: I would explain it; I mean, it depends on who your audience is, of course. But I would explain it like engineers spend all day in their IDEs. And they come to believe that that's what software is. But software is not lines of code. Software is those lines of code running in production with real users using it. That's when software becomes real. And, for too long, we've treated like that, like, an entirely different...well, it's written. [laughs] You know, for launch, I was like, well, it's ops' problem, as the meme says. But we haven't really gotten to a point yet where...I feel like when you're developing with observability; you should be instrumenting your code as you go with an eye towards your future self. How am I going to know if this is working or not? How am I going to know if this breaks? And when you deploy it, you should then go and look at your code in production and look at it through the lens of the telemetry that you just wrote and ask yourself, is it doing what I expected it to? Does anything else look weird? Because the cost of finding and fixing bugs goes up exponentially from the moment that you write them. It's like you type a bug; you backspace. Cool, good for you. That's the fastest you can fix it. The next fastest is if you find it when you're running tests. But tests are only ever going to find the things you could predict were going to fail or that have already failed. The first real opportunity that you have to see if your code really works or not is right after you've deployed it, but only if you've given yourself the telemetry to do so. Like, the idea of just merging your code, like walking out the door or merging your code and waiting to get paged or to get [laughs] escalated to this is madness. This should be such an artifact of the battle days when dev writes, and ops runs it. That doesn't work, right? Like, in the beginning, we had software engineers who wrote code and ran that code in production, and that's how things should be. You should be writing code and running code in production. And the reason I think we're starting to see that reality emerge again is because our systems have gotten so complicated. We kind of can't not because you can't really run your code as a black box anymore. You can't ignore what's on the inside. You have to be able to look at the code in order to be able to run it effectively. And conversely, I don't think you could develop good code unless you're constantly exposing yourself to the consequences of that code. It lets you know when it breaks, that whole feedback loop that completely severed when we had dev versus ops. And we're slowly kind of knitting it together again. But, like, that's what's at the heart of that incredibly powerful feedback loop. It's the heart of all software engineering is, instrumenting your code and looking at it and asking yourself, is it doing what I expected it to do? WILL: That's really neat. You said you're a reliability engineer. What's your background? Tell me more about it because you're the CTO of Honeycomb. So you have some technical background. What does that look like? CHARITY: Yeah, well, I was a music major and then a serial dropout. I've never graduated from anything, ever. And then, I worked at startups in Silicon Valley. Nothing you'd ever...well, I worked at Linden Lab for a few years and some other places. But honestly, the reason I started Honeycomb was because...so I worked at Parse. I was the infrastructure lead at Parse; rest in peace. It got acquired by Facebook. And when I was leaving Facebook, it was the only time in my life that I'd ever had a pedigree. Well, I've actually been an ops engineer my entire career. When I was leaving Facebook, I had VCs going, "Would you like some money to do something? Because you're coming from Facebook, so you must be smart." On the one hand, that was kind of offensive. And on the other hand, like, I kind of felt the obligation to just take the money and run, like, on behalf of all dropouts, of women, and queers everywhere. Just, you know, how often...am I ever going to get this chance again? No, I'm not. So, good. VICTORIA: Yes, I will accept your money. [laughs] CHARITY: Yeah, right? VICTORIA: I will take it. And I'm not surprised that you were a music major. I've met many, I would say, people who are active in social media about DevOps, and then it turns out they were a theater major, [laughs] or music, or something different. And they kind of naturally found their way. CHARITY: The whole ops SRE profession has historically been a real magnet for weirdo people, weird past, people who took very non-traditional. So it's always been about tinkering, just understanding systems. And there hasn't been this high bar for formal, you know, knowledge that you need just to get your first job. I feel like this is all changing. And it makes me kind of...I understand why it's changing, and it also makes me kind of sad. VICTORIA: So I think you have a quote about, you know, working on infrastructure teams that everything comes back to databases. CHARITY: [laughs] VICTORIA: I wonder if you could expand on that. CHARITY: I've been an accidental DBA my entire career. I just always seemed to be the one left holding the bag. [laughs] We were playing musical chairs. I just feel like, you know, as you're moving up the stack, you can get more and more reckless. As you move down the stack, the closer you get to, like, bits on disk, the more conservative you have to be, the more blast radius your mistakes could have. Like, shit changes all the time in JavaScript land. In database land, we're still doing CRUD operators, like, since Stonebreaker did it in the '70s. We're still doing very fundamental stuff. I love it, though, because, I don't know, it's such a capsule of computers at large, which is just that people have no idea how much shit breaks. [laughs] Stuff breaks all the time. And the beauty of it is that we keep going. It's not that things don't break. You have no idea how much stuff is broken in your stack right now. But we find ways to resolve it after the fact. I just think that data is so fascinating because it has so much gravity. I don't know, I could keep going, but I feel like you get the point. I just think it's really fun. I think danger is fun, I think. It might not surprise you to learn that I, too, was diagnosed with ADHD in the past couple of years. I feel like this is another strand that most DevOps, SRE types have in common, which is just [laughs] highly motivated in a good way by panic. [laughs] WILL: I love that you said you love danger because I feel like that is right in your wheelhouse. Like, you have to love danger to be in that field because it's predictable. You're the one that's coming in and putting out the fires when everyone sometimes they're running for the window. Like you said, like, you got caught holding the bag. So that's really neat. This is a big question for me, especially for being an engineer, a dev, do you find that product and design teams understand and see the value in SRE? CHARITY: Oooh. These types of cultural questions are always so difficult for me to gauge whether or not my sample is representative of the larger population. Because, in my experience, you know, ops teams typically rule the roost, like, they get final say over everything. But I know that that's not typically true. Like, throughout the industry, like, ops teams kind of have a history of being kind of kicked around. I think that they do see the value because everybody can see when it breaks. But I think that they mostly see the value when it breaks. I think that it takes a rare, farsighted product team to be able to consent to giving, like, investments all along in the kinds of improvements that will pay off later on instead of just pouring all of the resources into fast fixes and features and feature, feature, feature. And then, of course, you know, you slowly grind to a halt as a team because you're just amassing surface area. You're not paying down your tech debt. And I think it's not always clear to product and design leaders how to make those investments in a way that actually benefits them instead of it just being a cost center. You know, it's just something that's always a break on them instead of actually enabling them to move faster. WILL: Yeah, yeah. And I can definitely see that being an engineer dev. I'm going to change it a little bit. And I'm going to ask, Victoria, since you're the managing director of that team, how do you feel about that question? Do you feel that's the same thing, or what's your observation of that? VICTORIA: I think Charity is, like, spot on because it does depend on the type of organization that you're working in, the hierarchy, and who gets priority over budget and things like that. And so the interesting thought for me coming from federal IT organizations into more commercial and startup organizations is that there is a little bit of a disconnect. And we started to ask our designers and developers like, "Well, have you thought much about, like, what happens when this fails?" [laughs] And especially -- CHARITY: Great question. VICTORIA: Yeah, like, when you're dealing with, like, healthcare startups or with bank startups and really thinking through all the ways it could go wrong. Is it a new pathway? Which I think is exciting for a lot of people. And I'm curious, too, Charity, like with Honeycomb, was there things that surprised you in your journey of discovery about, you know, building a company about observability and what people wanted out of this space? CHARITY: Oh my goodness. [laughs] Was anything not a surprise? I mean, [laughs] yeah, absolutely. You're a director of what team? VICTORIA: I'm a managing director of our Mission Control team. CHARITY: Oooh. VICTORIA: Which is our platform engineering, and DevOps, and SRE team. CHARITY: Now, does your platform engineering team have product managers? VICTORIA: I think it might be me. [laughs] CHARITY: Aha. VICTORIA: It might be me. And we have a team lead, and our CTO is actually our acting development director. So he's really leading the development of that project platform. CHARITY: When I was in New York the last couple of days, I just gave a talk at KubeCon about the Perils, Pitfalls, and Pratfalls of Platform Engineering, just talking about all of the ways that platform teams accidentally steer themselves into the ditch. One of the biggest mistakes that people make in that situation is not running the platform team like a product team, you know, having a sort of, like, if we build it, they will come sort of a mentality towards the platform that they're building internally for their engineers, and not doing the things like, you know, discovery or finding out like, am I really building, you know, the most important thing, you know, that people need right now? And it's like, I didn't learn those skills as an engineer. Like, in the infrastructure land, we didn't learn how to work with product people. We didn't learn how to work with designers. And I feel like the biggest piece of career advice that I give, you know, people like me now, is learn how to work with product and like a product org. I'm curious, like, what you're observing in your realm when it comes to this stuff. Like, how much like a product org do you work? VICTORIA: Oh, I agree 100%. So I've actually been interested in applying our platform project to the thoughtbot Incubator Program. [laughs] CHARITY: Mmm. VICTORIA: So they have this method for doing market strategy, and user interviews, and all of that...exactly what you're saying, like, run it like a product. So I want them to help me with it. [laughs] CHARITY: Nice. VICTORIA: Yes, because I am also a managing director, and so we're managing a team and building business. And we also have this product or this open-source project, really. It's not...we don't necessarily want to be prescriptive with how we, as thoughtbot, tell people how to build their platforms. So with every client, we do a deep dive to see how is their dev team actually working? What are the pain points? What are the things we can do based on, like, you know, this collection of tools and knowledge that we have on what's worked for past clients that makes the most sense for them? So, in that way, I think it is very customer-focused [laughs], right? And that's the motto we want to keep with. And I have been on other project teams where we just try to reproduce what worked for one client and to make that a product. And it doesn't always work [laughs] because of what you're saying. Like, you have to really...and especially, I think that just the diversity of the systems that we are building and have been built is kind of, like, breathtaking [laughs], you know. CHARITY: Yeah. [chuckles] VICTORIA: I'm sure you have some familiarity with that. CHARITY: [laughs] VICTORIA: But what did you really find in the market that worked for you right away, like, was, like, the problem that you were able to solve and start building within your business? CHARITY: We did everything all wrong. So I had had this experience at Facebook, which, you know, at Parse, you know, we had all these reliability issues because of the architecture. What we were building was just fundamentally...as soon as any customer got big, like, they would take up all the resources in this shared, you know, tenancy thing, and the whole platform would go down. And it was so frustrating. And we were working on a rewrite and everything. Like, it was professionally humiliating for me as a reliability engineer to have a platform this bad at reliability. And part of the issue was that you know, we had a million mobile apps, and it was a different app every time, different application...the iTunes Store, like, top five or something. And so the previous generation of tools and strategies like building dashboards and doing retros and being like, well, I'll make a dashboard so that I can find this problem next time immediately, like, just went out the window. Like, none of them would work because they were always about the last battle. And it was always something new. And at one point, we started getting some datasets into this tool at Facebook called Scuba. It was butt ugly. Like, it was aggressively hostile to users. But it let us do one thing really well, which was slice and dice high cardinality dimensions in near real-time. And having the ability to do that to, like, break down by user ID, which is not possible with, you know, I don't know how familiar -- I'll briefly describe high cardinality. So imagine you have a collection of 100 million users. And the highest possible cardinality would be a unique ID because, you know, social security number, very high cardinality. And something much lower cardinality would be like inches of height. And all of metrics and dashboards are oriented around low cardinality dimensions. If you have more than a couple hundred hosts, you can no longer tag your metrics with a host ID. It just falls apart. So being able to break down by, like, you know, one of a million app IDs. It took...the amount of time it took for us to identify and find these brand-new problems, it dropped like a rock, like, from hours of opening it. We never even solved a lot of the problems that we saw. We just recovered. We moved on [laughs] with our day, dropped from that to, like, seconds or minutes. Like, it wasn't even an engineering problem anymore. It was like a support problem, you know, you just go click, click, click, click, click, oh, there it is. Just follow the trail of breadcrumbs. That made such an impression on me. And when I was leaving, I was just like, I can't go back to not having something like this. I was so much less powerful as an engineer. It's just, like, it's unthinkable. So when we started Honeycomb, we were just, like, we went hands down, and we started building. We didn't want to write a database. We had to write a database because there was nothing out there that could do this. And we spent the first year or two not even really talking to customers. When we did talk to customers, I would tell our engineers to ignore their feedback [laughs] because they were all telling us they wanted better metrics. And we're like, no, we're not doing metrics. The first thing that we found we could kind of connect to real problems that people were looking for was that it was high cardinality. There were a few, not many; there were a few engineers out there Googling for high cardinality metrics. And those engineers found us and became our earliest customers because we were able to do breathtaking...from their perspective, they were like, we've been told this is impossible. We've been told that this can't be done. Things like Intercom was able to start tagging other requests with, like, app ID and customer ID. And immediately started noticing things like, oh, this database that we were just about to have to, like, spend six months sharding and extending, oh, it turns out 80% of the queries in flight to this database are all coming from one customer who is paying us $200 a month, so maybe we shouldn't [laughs] do that engineering labor. Maybe we should just, you know, throttle this guy who is only paying us 200 bucks a month. Or just all these things you can't actually see until you can use this very, very special tool. And then once you can see that... So, like, our first customers became rabid fans and vouched for us to investors, and this still blows people's minds to this day. It's an incredibly difficult thing to explain and describe to people, but once they see it on their own data, it clicks because everybody's run into this problem before, and it's really frustrating. VICTORIA: Yeah, that's super interesting and a great example to illustrate that point of just, like, not really knowing what's going on in your system. And, you know, you mentioned just, like, certainly at scale, that's when you really, really need to have [laughs] data and insight into your systems. CHARITY: Yeah. VICTORIA: But one question I get a lot is, like, at what scale do you actually need to start worrying about SRE? [laughs] Which -- CHARITY: SRE? VICTORIA: Yeah, I'll let you answer that. Yeah, site reliability or even things like...like, everything under that umbrella like observability, like, you know, putting in monitoring and tracing and all this stuff. Sometimes people are just like, well, when do I actually have to care? [laughs] CHARITY: I recognize this is, you know, coming from somebody who does this for a living, so, like, people can write it off all they want. But, like, the idea of developing without observability is just sad to me, like, from day one. This is not a tax. It's not something that slows you down or makes your lives worse. It's something that makes your lives better from day one. It helps you move more quickly, with more confidence. It helps you not make as many mistakes. It helps you... Like, most people are used to interacting with their systems, which are just like flaming hairballs under their bed. Nobody has ever understood these systems. They certainly don't understand them. And every day, they ship more code that they don't understand, create systems that they've never understood. And then an alarm goes off, and everybody just, like, braces for impact because they don't understand them. This is not the inevitable end state of computing. It doesn't have to be like this. You can have systems that are well-understood, that are tractable, that you could...it's just...it's so sad to me that people are like, oh God, when do I have to add telemetry? And I'm just like, how do you write software without telemetry? How do you have any confidence that the work you're doing is what you thought you were doing? You know, I just... And, of course, if you're waiting to tack it on later, of course, it's not going to be as useful because you're trying to add telemetry for stuff you were writing weeks, or months, or years ago. The time to add it is while you're writing it. No one is ever going to understand your software as well as you do the moment that you're writing it. That's when you know your original intent. You know what you're trying to do. You know why you're trying to do it. You know what you tried that didn't work. You know, ultimately, what the most valuable pieces of data are. Why wouldn't you leave little breadcrumbs for yourself so that future you can find them? You know, it's like...I just feel like this entire mental shift it can become just as much of a habit as like commenting your code or adding, you know, commenting in your pull request, you know. It becomes second nature, and reaching for it becomes second nature. You should have in your body a feeling of I'm not done until you've looked at your telemetry in production. That's the first moment that you can tell yourself, ah, yes, it probably does what I think it does, right? So, like, this question it makes me sad. It gets me a little worked up because I feel like it's such a symptom of people who I know what their jobs are like based on that question, and it's not as good as it could be. Their jobs are much sadder and more confusing than it could be if they had a slightly different approach to telemetry. That's the observability bit. But about SRE, very few ops engineers start companies, it seems, when I did, you know, I was one of three founding members. And the first thing I did was, of course, spin up an infrastructure and set up CI/CD and all this stuff. And I'm, like, feeling less useful than the others but, you know, doing my part. But that stuff that I spun up, we didn't have to hire an SRE for years, and when we did, it was pretty optional. And this is a system, you know, things trickle down, right? Doing things right from the beginning and having them be clear and well-understood, and efficient, we were able to do so much with so few people. You know, we were landing, you know, hundreds of thousand-dollar deals with people who thought we had hundreds of employees. We had 12 engineers for the first almost five years, just 12 engineers. But, like, almost all of the energy that they put into the world went into moving the business forward, not fighting with the system, or thrashing the system, or trying to figure out bugs, or trying to track down things that were just, like, impossible to figure out. We waste so much time as engineers by trying to add this stuff in later. So the actual answer to your question is, like, if you aren't lucky enough to have an ops co-founder, is as soon as you have real users. You know, I've made a career out of basically being the first engineer to join from infrastructure when the software engineers are starting to have real customers. Like, at Parse, they brought me in when they were about to do their alpha release. And they're like, whoa, okay, I guess we better have someone who knows how to run things. And I came in, and I spent the next, you know, year or so just cleaning up shit that they had done, which wasn't terrible. But, you know, they just didn't really know what they were doing. So I kind of had to undo everything, redo it. And just the earlier, the better, right? It will pay off. Now, that said, there is a real risk of over-engineering early. Companies they don't fail because they innovated too quickly; let's put it that way. They fail because they couldn't focus. They couldn't connect with their customers. They couldn't do all these things. And so you really do want to do just enough to get you to the next place so that you can put most of your effort into making product for your customers. But yeah, it's so much easier to set yourself up with auto-deployment so that every CI/CD run automatically deploys your code to production and just maintain as you grow. That is so easy compared to trying to take, you know, a long, slow, you know, leaky deploy process and turn it into one that could auto-deploy safely after every commit. So yeah, do it early. And then maintain is the easiest way in the world to do this stuff. Mid-Roll Ad: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what's important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. WILL: Correct me if I'm wrong, I think you said Facebook and mobile. Do you have, not experience with mobile but do you...does Honeycomb do anything in the mobile space? Because I feel like that portion is probably the most complicated for mobile, like, dealing with iOS and Android and everything that they're asking for. So... CHARITY: We don't have mobile stuff at Honeycomb. Parse was a mobile Backend as a Service. So I went straight from doing all mobile all the time to doing no mobile at all. I also went from doing databases all the time to doing, you know...it's good career advice typically to find a niche and then stay in it, and I have not followed that advice. [laughter] I've just jumped from...as soon as I'm good at something, I start doing something else. WILL: Let me ask you this, how come you don't see more mobile SRE or help in that area? CHARITY: I think that you see lots of SREs for mobile apps, but they're on the back-end side. They're on the server side. So it's just not as visible. But even if you've got, like, a stack that's entirely serverless, you still need SRE. But I think that the model is really shifting. You know, it used to be you hired an SRE team or an ops team to carry the pager for you and to take the alerts and to, like, buffer everything, and nowadays, that's not the expectation. That's not what good companies do. You know, they set up systems for their software engineers to own their code in production. But they need help because they're not experts in this, and that's where SRE types come in. Is that your experience? WILL: Yeah, for the most part. Yeah, that is. CHARITY: Yeah, I think that's very healthy. VICTORIA: And I agree with that as well. And I'm going to take that clip of your reaction to that question about when you should start doing [laughter] observability and just play for everybody whenever someone asks [laughs] me that. I'm like, here's the answer. That's great. CHARITY: I think a good metaphor for that is like, if you're buying a house and taking out a loan, the more of a down payment you can put down upfront, the lower that your monthly payments are going to be for the rest of your...you amortize that out over the next 20-30 years. The more you can do that, the better your life is going to be because interest rates are a bitch. VICTORIA: It makes sense. And yeah, like, to your point earlier about when people actually do start to care about it is usually after something has broken in a traumatic way that can be really bad for your clients and, like, your legal [laughter] stance -- CHARITY: That's true. VICTORIA: As a company. CHARITY: Facing stuff, yeah, is where people usually start to think about it. But, like, the less visible part, and I think almost the more important part is what it does to your velocity and your ability to execute internally. When you have a good, clean system that is well-tended that, you know, where the amount of time between when you're writing the code and when the code is in production, and you're looking at...when that is short and tight, like, no more than a couple of hours, like, it's a different job than if it takes you, like, days or weeks to deploy. Your changes get bashed up with other people's. And, you know, like, you enter, like, the software development death spiral where, you know, it takes a while. So your diffs get even bigger, so code review takes even longer, so it takes even longer. And then your changes are all getting bashed up. And, you know, now you need a team to run deploys and releases. And now you need an SRE team to do the firefighting. And, like, your systems are...the bigger it gets, the more complicated it gets, the more you're spending time just waiting on each other or switching contexts. You ever, like, see an app and been like, oh, that's a cool app? I wonder...they have 800 engineers at that company. And you're just like, what the hell are they all doing? Like, seriously, how does it take that many engineers to build this admittedly nice little product? I guarantee you it's because their internal hygiene is just terrible. It takes them too long to deploy things. They've forgotten what they've written by the time it's out, so nobody ever goes and looks at it. So it's just like, it's becoming a hairball under your bed. Nobody's looking at it. It's becoming more and more mysterious to you. Like, I have a rule of thumb which there's no mathematical science behind this, just experience. But it's a rule of thumb that says that if it takes you, you know, on the order of, say, a couple of hours tops to deploy your software, if it takes you that many engineers to build and own that product, well, if your deploys take on the order of days instead of hours, it will take you twice as many people [chuckles] to build and support that product. And if it takes you weeks to deploy that product, it will take you twice as many again; if anything, that is an underestimate because it actually goes up exponentially, not linearly. But, like, we are so wasteful when it comes to people's time. It is so much easier for managers to go, uh, we're overloaded. Let's hire more people. For some reason, you can always get headcount when you can't actually get the discipline to say no to things or the people to work on internal tools to, like, shrink that gap between when you've written it and when it's live. And just the waste, it just spirals out of control, man, and it's not good. And, you know, it should be such a fun, creative, fulfilling job where you spend your day solving puzzles for money and moving the business materially forward every day. And instead, how much of our time do we just sit here, like, twiddling our thumbs and waiting for the build to finish or waiting for code review [laughs] to get turned around? Or, you know, swapping projects and, like, trying to page all that context in your brain? Like, it's absurd, and this is not that hard of a problem to fix. VICTORIA: Engineering should be fun, and it should be dangerous. That's what [laughs] I'm getting out of this -- CHARITY: It should be fun, and it should be dangerous. I love that. VICTORIA: Fun and dangerous. I like it. [laughs] And speaking of danger, I mean, maybe it's not dangerous, but what does success really look like for you at Honeycomb in the next six months or even in the next five years? CHARITY: I find it much more easier to answer what failure would look like. VICTORIA: You can answer that too if you like. [laughs] CHARITY: [laughs] What would success look like? I mean, obviously, I have no desire to ever go through another acquisition, and I don't want to go out of business. So it'd be nice not to do either of those things, which means since we've taken VC money, IPO would be nice eventually. But, like, ultimately, like, what motivates Christine and me and our entire company really is just, you know, we're engineers. We've felt this pain. We have seen that the world can be better. [laughs] We really just want to help, you know, move engineering into the current decade. I feel like there are so many teams out there who hear me talk about this stuff. And they listen wistfully, and they're like, yeah, and they roll their eyes. They're like, yeah, you work in Silicon Valley, or yeah, but you work at a startup, or yeah...they have all these reasons why they don't get nice things. We're just not good enough engineers is the one that breaks my heart the most because it's not true. Like, it has nothing to do...it has almost nothing to do with how good of an engineer you are. You have to be so much better of an engineer to deal with a giant hairball than with software that gets deployed, you know, within the hour that you can just go look at and see if it's working or not. I want this to go mainstream. I want people...I want engineers to just have a better time at work. And I want people to succeed at what they're doing. And just...the more we can bring that kind of change to more and more people, the more successful I will feel. VICTORIA: I really like that. And I think it's great. And it also makes me think I find that people who work in the DevOps space have a certain type of mentality sometimes, [laughs] like, it's about the greater community and, like, just making being at work better. And I also think it maybe makes you more willing to admit your failures [laughs] like you were earlier, right? CHARITY: Probably. VICTORIA: That's part of the culture. It's like, well, we messed up. [laughs] We broke stuff, and we're going to learn from it. CHARITY: It's healthy. I'm trying to institute a rule where at all hands when we're doing different organizations giving an update every two weeks, where we talk two-thirds about our successes and things that worked great and one-third about things that just didn't work. Like, I think we could all stand to talk about our failures a lot more. VICTORIA: Yeah, makes it a lot less scary, I think [laughs], right? CHARITY: Yeah, yeah. It democratizes the feeling, and it genuinely...it makes me happy. It's like, that didn't work, great. Now we know not to do it. Of the infinite number of things that we could try, now we know something for real. I think it's exciting. And, I don't know, I think it's funny when things fail. And I think that if we can just laugh about it together... You know, in every engineering org that I've ever worked at, out of all the teams, the ops types teams have always been the ones that are the most tightly bonded. They have this real, like, Band of Brothers type of sentiment. And I think it's because, you know, we've historically endured most of the pain. [laughs] But, like, that sense of, like, it's us against the system, that there is hilarity in failure. And, at the end of the day, we're all just monkeys, like, poking at electrical sockets is, I think...I think it's healthy. [laughs] WILL: That's really neat. I love it. This is one of my favorite questions. What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time? CHARITY: I don't know. I think I'd just give myself a thumbs up and go; it's going to be all right. I don't know; I wouldn't... I don't think that I would try to alter the time continuum [laughs] in any way. But I had a lot of anxiety when I was younger about going to hell and all this stuff. And so I think...but anything I said to my future self, I wouldn't have believed anyway. So yeah, I respectfully decline the offer. VICTORIA: That's fair. I mean, I think about that a lot too actually, like, I sometimes think like, well, if I could go back to myself a year ago and just -- CHARITY: Yeah. I would look at me like I was stupid. [laughter] VICTORIA: That makes sense. It reminds me a little bit about what you said, though, like, doing SRE and everything upfront or the observability pieces and building it correctly in a way you can deploy fastly is like a gift to your future self. [laughs] CHARITY: Yes, it is, with a bow. Yes, exactly. VICTORIA: There you go. Well, all right. I think we are about ready to wrap up. Is there anything you would like to promote specifically? CHARITY: We just launched this really cool little thing at Honeycomb. And you won't often hear me say the words cool and AI in proximity to each other, but we just launched this really dope little thing. It's a tool for using natural language to ask questions of your telemetry. So, if you just deployed something and you want to know, like, what's slow or did anything change, you can just ask it using English, and it does a ChatGPT thing and generates the right graphs for you. It's pretty sweet. VICTORIA: That's really cool. So, if you have Honeycomb set up and working in your system and then you can just ask the little chatbot, "Hey, what's going on here?" CHARITY: Yeah. What's the slowest endpoint? And it'll just tell you, which is great because I feel like I do not think graphically at all. My brain just really doesn't. So I have never been the person who's, like, creating dashboards or graphs. My friend Ben Hartshorne works with me, and he'll make the dashboards. And then I get up in the morning, and I bookmark them. And so we're sort of symbiotic. But everyone can tweak a query, right? Once you have something that you know is, like, within spitting distance as the data you want, anyone can tweak it, but composing is really hard. So I feel like this really helps you get over that initial hurdle of, like, er, what do I break down by? What do I group by? What are the field names? You just ask it the question, and then you've got to click, click, click, and, like, get exactly what you want out of it. I think it's, like, a game changer. VICTORIA: That sounds extremely cool. And we will certainly link to it in our show notes today. Thank you so much for being with us and spending the time, Charity. CHARITY: Yeah, this was really fun. VICTORIA: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you could find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Charity Majors.

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Charity Majors about enabling culture, the pendulum swing between engineering and management, rethinking career paths and opportunities challenges with AIOPS. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3p9gcVl Subscribe to the Software Architects' Newsletter [monthly]: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon San Francisco https://qconsf.com/ Oct 2-6, 2023 QCon London https://qconlondon.com/ April 8-10, 2024 Follow InfoQ: - Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq - Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ - LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq - Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 - Instagram: @infoqdotcom - Youtube: www.youtube.com/infoq Write for InfoQ: - Join a community of experts. - Increase your visibility. - Grow your career. https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

Today I'm chatting with Charity, author of "Meant For More" and inspirational speaker. We discuss the power of finding and uncovering yourself. Charity talks about growing up dreaming of big things and learning to take charge as a natural leader. Additionally, she speaks to the power of personal growth and shares about the darker times when she didn't fit in and was unable to show her true self. Charity sheds light on her own personal journey and the need to unlearn her limiting beliefs. The conversation dives into learning how to trust your emotions, take action, and build the best you!00:04:03 Face your fears and heal.00:06:16 We are all here for a purpose.00:11:08 Believe in yourself and shine.00:20:34 Women can achieve great things.00:21:27 Find the right room.00:29:37 Intentionally build community.00:31:25 Believe in yourself and lead.00:38:51 Believe in yourself and take action.00:41:13 Trust yourself and shine.Connect with Charity:IG: @charitymajorsPodcast: Meant For MoreBook: Meant For More: Igniting Your Purpose in a World That Tries To Dim Your Light

In this episode, we talk about "⁠Deploys Are the ✨WRONG✨ Way to Change User Experience" by ⁠Charity Majors⁠ (one of the best bloggers out there, check out more ⁠here⁠). Do you need to make a deploy to show a new user experience? Do you not use feature toggles? Do you hate pedantic questions for the sake of making a point? If you answered yes to any of these, listen to this lightning-fast episode on how to separate your deploys from your releases and make your customers happier. In other news, Evan is done learning and hates lots of books, Joe is getting Rusty again, and we have some of the good-est good news yet. Make sure to check out the ⁠Runtime Rundown⁠ site to drop us a suggestion, comment on episodes, and listen to our back catalogue! Music by ⁠Hina⁠ and ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠

Charity went from the girl hiding in the background to success. She tells her story of finding her unshakable confidence and shares how you can have it too! Social media and contact information: @CharityMajors on Instagram Instagram.com/charitymajors https://charitymajors.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/damagedparents/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/damagedparents/support

Charity Majors is CTO and co-founder at Honeycomb, book author, speaker, and a person unselfishly sharing her views and lessons from both leadership and engineering perspective. I talked to Charity about engineering management and platform engineering, how long you should sharpen your technical saw before thinking about a management role, and whether it is ok for managers to feel useless sometimes :)Subscribe to 0800-DEVOPS newsletter here.This interview is featured in 0800-DEVOPS #44 - The Engineering/Management Pendulum with Charity Majors.[Check out podcast chapters if available on your podcast platform or use links below](6:37)"The greatest technologists in the world that I know have all done some time as managers. They all have that skill set. But they are never too far away, never too many years removed from being an IC themselves, because there is wisdom you get from dealing with the technology that you can't get from sitting several layers away."(11:55)"As a manager, you can't make decisions in a vacuum the way you could as an engineer. There is no such thing as a good decision independent of other people because all decisions involve other people."(18:14)"Engineers don't typically go, "I'm done with coding forever. I wanna be a manager ". They want to try things. They want to go back and forth. Most organizations haven't figured out how to incentivize this or how to support people in doing it."(18:55)"You want to optimize not for people becoming more powerful in one role but for them staying curious and engaged."(23:10)"Management is just a bunch of skills. People don't have to become managers in order to learn those skills."(25:35)"People should have some agency in what team they want to go to."(29:55)"Platform Engineering is a form of operationally focused software engineering where your customers are internal instead of external."(31:20)"You give them all these tools so they can own their own code in production, not so you can own it for them."(34:52)"The experience of running software is one that has been consistently devalued and marginalized when it comes to software engineering teams. They typically don't give enough respect to just how difficult and traumatic it can be. There is a sense you get from having run big complex systems for a long time. You can sense where the holes are."

Live from Interact, we're bringing you an interview with our favorite CTO, Charity Majors. Never one to be shy about speaking her mind, Charity is an outspoken advocate for devs everywhere - and this passion made her a fan favorite at Interact. Listen as Charity discusses her career, why the hierarchy is bullshit (disclaimer: she likes to swear - we like that about her), and why platform engineering is the most exciting place to sit in computing today. Show NotesLearn about the power of Continuous MergeCharity's blogJoin the Dev Interrupted DiscordWant to try LinearB? Book a LinearB Demo and use the "Dev Interrupted Podcast" discount code.

About RichardRichard "RichiH" Hartmann is the Director of Community at Grafana Labs, Prometheus team member, OpenMetrics founder, OpenTelemetry member, CNCF Technical Advisory Group Observability chair, CNCF Technical Oversight Committee member, CNCF Governing Board member, and more. He also leads, organizes, or helps run various conferences from hundreds to 18,000 attendess, including KubeCon, PromCon, FOSDEM, DENOG, DebConf, and Chaos Communication Congress. In the past, he made mainframe databases work, ISP backbones run, kept the largest IRC network on Earth running, and designed and built a datacenter from scratch. Go through his talks, podcasts, interviews, and articles at https://github.com/RichiH/talks or follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TwitchiH for musings on the intersection of technology and society.Links Referenced: Grafana Labs: https://grafana.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TwitchiH Richard Hartmann list of talks: https://github.com/richih/talks TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at AWS AppConfig. Engineers love to solve, and occasionally create, problems. But not when it's an on-call fire-drill at 4 in the morning. Software problems should drive innovation and collaboration, NOT stress, and sleeplessness, and threats of violence. That's why so many developers are realizing the value of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags. Feature Flags let developers push code to production, but hide that that feature from customers so that the developers can release their feature when it's ready. This practice allows for safe, fast, and convenient software development. You can seamlessly incorporate AppConfig Feature Flags into your AWS or cloud environment and ship your Features with excitement, not trepidation and fear. To get started, go to snark.cloud/appconfig. That's snark.cloud/appconfig.Corey: This episode is brought to us in part by our friends at Datadog. Datadog's SaaS monitoring and security platform that enables full stack observability for developers, IT operations, security, and business teams in the cloud age. Datadog's platform, along with 500 plus vendor integrations, allows you to correlate metrics, traces, logs, and security signals across your applications, infrastructure, and third party services in a single pane of glass.Combine these with drag and drop dashboards and machine learning based alerts to help teams troubleshoot and collaborate more effectively, prevent downtime, and enhance performance and reliability. Try Datadog in your environment today with a free 14 day trial and get a complimentary T-shirt when you install the agent.To learn more, visit datadoghq/screaminginthecloud to get. That's www.datadoghq/screaminginthecloudCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. There are an awful lot of people who are incredibly good at understanding the ins and outs and the intricacies of the observability world. But they didn't have time to come on the show today. Instead, I am talking to my dear friend of two decades now, Richard Hartmann, better known on the internet as RichiH, who is the Director of Community at Grafana Labs, here to suffer—in a somewhat atypical departure for the theme of this show—personal attacks for once. Richie, thank you for joining me.Richard: And thank you for agreeing on personal attacks.Corey: Exactly. It was one of your riders. Like, there have to be the personal attacks back and forth or you refuse to appear on the show. You've been on before. In fact, the last time we did a recording, I believe you were here in person, which was a long time ago. What have you been up to?You're still at Grafana Labs. And in many cases, I would point out that, wow, you've been there for many years; that seems to be an atypical thing, which is an American tech industry perspective because every time you and I talk about this, you look at folks who—wow, you were only at that company for five years. What's wrong with you—you tend to take the longer view and I tend to have the fast twitch, time to go ahead and leave jobs because it's been more than 20 minutes approach. I see that you're continuing to live what you preach, though. How's it been?Richard: Yeah, so there's a little bit of Covid brains, I think. When we talked in 2018, I was still working at SpaceNet, building a data center. But the last two-and-a-half years didn't really happen for many people, myself included. So, I guess [laugh] that includes you.Corey: No, no you're right. You've only been at Grafana Labs a couple of years. One would think I would check the notes for shooting my mouth off. But then, one wouldn't know me.Richard: What notes? Anyway, I've been around Prometheus and Grafana Since 2015. But it's like, real, full-time everything is 2020. There was something in between. Since 2018, I contracted to do vulnerability handling and everything for Grafana Labs because they had something and they didn't know how to deal with it.But no, full time is 2020. But as to the space in the [unintelligible 00:02:45] of itself, it's maybe a little bit German of me, but trying to understand the real world and trying to get an overview of systems and how they actually work, and if they are working correctly and as intended, and if not, how they're not working as intended, and how to fix this is something which has always been super important to me, in part because I just want to understand the world. And this is a really, really good way to automate understanding of the world. So, it's basically a work-saving mechanism. And that's why I've been sticking to it for so long, I guess.Corey: Back in the early days of monitoring systems—so we called it monitoring back then because, you know, are using simple words that lack nuance was sort of de rigueur back then—we wound up effectively having tools. Nagios is the one that springs to mind, and it was terrible in all the ways you would expect a tool written in janky Perl in the early-2000s to be. But it told you what was going on. It tried to do a thing, generally reach a server or query it about things, and when things fell out of certain specs, it screamed its head off, which meant that when you had things like the core switch melting down—thinking of one very particular incident—you didn't get a Nagios alert; you got 4000 Nagios alerts. But start to finish, you could wrap your head rather fully around what Nagios did and why it did the sometimes strange things that it did.These days, when you take a look at Prometheus, which we hear a lot about, particularly in the Kubernetes space and Grafana, which is often mentioned in the same breath, it's never been quite clear to me exactly where those start and stop. It always feels like it's a component in a larger system to tell you what's going on rather than a one-stop shop that's going to, you know, shriek its head off when something breaks in the middle of the night. Is that the right way to think about it? The wrong way to think about it?Richard: It's a way to think about it. So personally, I use the terms monitoring and observability pretty much interchangeably. Observability is a relatively well-defined term, even though most people won't agree. But if you look back into the '70s into control theory where the term is coming from, it is the measure of how much you're able to determine the internal state of a system by looking at its inputs and its outputs. Depending on the definition, some people don't include the inputs, but that is the OG definition as far as I'm aware.And from this, there flow a lot of things. This question of—or this interpretation of the difference between telling that, yes, something's broken versus why something's broken. Or if you can't ask new questions on the fly, it's not observability. Like all of those things are fundamentally mapped to this definition of, I need enough data to determine the internal state of whatever system I have just by looking at what is coming in, what is going out. And that is at the core the thing. Now, obviously, it's become a buzzword, which is oftentimes the fate of successful things. So, it's become a buzzword, and you end up with cargo culting.Corey: I would argue periodically, that observability is hipster monitoring. If you call it monitoring, you get yelled at by Charity Majors. Which is tongue and cheek, but she has opinions, made, nonetheless shall I say, frustrating by the fact that she is invariably correct in those opinions, which just somehow makes it so much worse. It would be easy to dismiss things she says if she weren't always right. And the world is changing, especially as we get into the world of distributed systems.Is the server that runs the app working or not working loses meaning when we're talking about distributed systems, when we're talking about containers running on top of Kubernetes, which turns every outage into a murder mystery. We start having distributed applications composed of microservices, so you have no idea necessarily where an issue is. Okay, is this one microservice having an issue related to the request coming into a completely separate microservice? And it seems that for those types of applications, the answer has been tracing for a long time now, where originally that was something that felt like it was sprung, fully-formed from the forehead of some God known as one of the hyperscalers, but now is available to basically everyone, in theory.In practice, it seems that instrumenting applications still one of the hardest parts of all of this. I tried hooking up one of my own applications to be observed via OTEL, the open telemetry project, and it turns out that right now, OTEL and AWS Lambda have an intersection point that makes everything extremely difficult to work with. It's not there yet; it's not baked yet. And someday, I hope that changes because I would love to interchangeably just throw metrics and traces and logs to all the different observability tools and see which ones work, which ones don't, but that still feels very far away from current state of the art.Richard: Before we go there, maybe one thing which I don't fully agree with. You said that previously, you were told if a service up or down, that's the thing which you cared about, and I don't think that's what people actually cared about. At that time, also, what they fundamentally cared about: is the user-facing service up, or down, or impacted? Is it slow? Does it return errors every X percent for requests, something like this?Corey: Is the site up? And—you're right, I was hand-waving over a whole bunch of things. It was, “Okay. First, the web server is returning a page, yes or no? Great. Can I ping the server?” Okay, well, there are ways of server can crash and still leave enough of the TCP/IP stack up or it can respond to pings and do little else.And then you start adding things to it. But the Nagios thing that I always wanted to add—and had to—was, is the disk full? And that was annoying. And, on some level, like, why should I care in the modern era how much stuff is on the disk because storage is cheap and free and plentiful? The problem is, after the third outage in a month because the disk filled up, you start to not have a good answer for well, why aren't you monitoring whether the disk is full?And that was the contributors to taking down the server. When the website broke, there were what felt like a relatively small number of reasonably well-understood contributors to that at small to midsize applications, which is what I'm talking about, the only things that people would let me touch. I wasn't running hyperscale stuff where you have a fleet of 10,000 web servers and, “Is the server up?” Yeah, in that scenario, no one cares. But when we're talking about the database server and the two application servers and the four web servers talking to them, you think about it more in terms of pets than you do cattle.Richard: Yes, absolutely. Yet, I think that was a mistake back then, and I tried to do it differently, as a specific example with the disk. And I'm absolutely agreeing that previous generation tools limit you in how you can actually work with your data. In particular, once you're with metrics where you can do actual math on the data, it doesn't matter if the disk is almost full. It matters if that disk is going to be full within X amount of time.If that disk is 98% full and it sits there at 98% for ten years and provides the service, no one cares. The thing is, will it actually run out in the next two hours, in the next five hours, what have you. Depending on this, is this currently or imminently a customer-impacting or user-impacting then yes, alert on it, raise hell, wake people, make them fix it, as opposed to this thing can be dealt with during business hours on the next workday. And you don't have to wake anyone up.Corey: Yeah. The big filer with massive amounts of storage has crossed the 70% line. Okay, now it's time to start thinking about that, what do you want to do? Maybe it's time to order another shelf of discs for it, which is going to take some time. That's a radically different scenario than the 20 gigabyte root volume on your server just started filling up dramatically; the rate of change is such that'll be full in 20 minutes.Yeah, one of those is something you want to wake people up for. Generally speaking, you don't want to wake people up for what is fundamentally a longer-term strategic business problem. That can be sorted out in the light of day versus, “[laugh] we're not going to be making money in two hours, so if I don't wake up and fix this now.” That's the kind of thing you generally want to be woken up for. Well, let's be honest, you don't want that to happen at all, but if it does happen, you kind of want to know in advance rather than after the fact.Richard: You're literally describing linear predict from Prometheus, which is precisely for this, where I can look back over X amount of time and make a linear prediction because everything else breaks down at scale, blah, blah, blah, to detail. But the thing is, I can draw a line with my pencil by hand on my data and I can predict when is this thing going to it. Which is obviously precisely correct if I have a TLS certificate. It's a little bit more hand-wavy when it's a disk. But still, you can look into the future and you say, “What will be happening if current trends for the last X amount of time continue in Y amount of time.” And that's precisely a thing where you get this more powerful ability of doing math with your data.Corey: See, when you say it like that, it sounds like it actually is a whole term of art, where you're focusing on an in-depth field, where salaries are astronomical. Whereas the tools that I had to talk about this stuff back in the day made me sound like, effectively, the sysadmin that I was grunting and pointing: “This is gonna fill up.” And that is how I thought about it. And this is the challenge where it's easy to think about these things in narrow, defined contexts like that, but at scale, things break.Like the idea of anomaly detection. Well, okay, great if normally, the CPU and these things are super bored and suddenly it gets really busy, that's atypical. Maybe we should look into it, assuming that it has a challenge. The problem is, that is a lot harder than it sounds because there are so many factors that factor into it. And as soon as you have something, quote-unquote, “Intelligent,” making decisions on this, it doesn't take too many false positives before you start ignoring everything it has to say, and missing legitimate things. It's this weird and obnoxious conflation of both hard technical problems and human psychology.Richard: And the breaking up of old service boundaries. Of course, when you say microservices, and such, fundamentally, functionally a microservice or nanoservice, picoservice—but the pendulum is already swinging back to larger units of complexity—but it fundamentally does not make any difference if I have a monolith on some mainframe or if I have a bunch of microservices. Yes, I can scale differently, I can scale horizontally a lot more easily, vertically, it's a little bit harder, blah, blah, blah, but fundamentally, the logic and the complexity, which is being packaged is fundamentally the same. More users, everything, but it is fundamentally the same. What's happening again, and again, is I'm breaking up those old boundaries, which means the old tools which have assumptions built in about certain aspects of how I can actually get an overview of a system just start breaking down, when my complexity unit or my service or what have I, is usually congruent with a physical piece, of hardware or several services are congruent with that piece of hardware, it absolutely makes sense to think about things in terms of this one physical server. The fact that you have different considerations in cloud, and microservices, and blah, blah, blah, is not inherently that it is more complex.On the contrary, it is fundamentally the same thing. It scales with users' everything, but it is fundamentally the same thing, but I have different boundaries of where I put interfaces onto my complexity, which basically allow me to hide all of this complexity from the downstream users.Corey: That's part of the challenge that I think we're grappling with across this entire industry from start to finish. Where we originally looked at these things and could reason about it because it's the computer and I know how those things work. Well, kind of, but okay, sure. But then we start layering levels of complexity on top of layers of complexity on top of layers of complexity, and suddenly, when things stop working the way that we expect, it can be very challenging to unpack and understand why. One of the ways I got into this whole space was understanding, to some degree, of how system calls work, of how the kernel wound up interacting with userspace, about how Linux systems worked from start to finish. And these days, that isn't particularly necessary most of the time for the care and feeding of applications.The challenge is when things start breaking, suddenly having that in my back pocket to pull out could be extremely handy. But I don't think it's nearly as central as it once was and I don't know that I would necessarily advise someone new to this space to spend a few years as a systems person, digging into a lot of those aspects. And this is why you need to know what inodes are and how they work. Not really, not anymore. It's not front and center the way that it once was, in most environments, at least in the world that I live in. Agree? Disagree?Richard: Agreed. But it's very much unsurprising. You probably can't tell me how to precisely grow sugar cane or corn, you can't tell me how to refine the sugar out of it, but you can absolutely bake a cake. But you will not be able to tell me even a third of—and I'm—for the record, I'm also not able to tell you even a third about the supply chain which just goes from I have a field and some seeds and I need to have a package of refined sugar—you're absolutely enabled to do any of this. The thing is, you've been part of the previous generation of infrastructure where you know how this underlying infrastructure works, so you have more ability to reason about this, but it's not needed for cloud services nearly as much.You need different types of skill sets, but that doesn't mean the old skill set is completely useless, at least not as of right now. It's much more a case of you need fewer of those people and you need them in different places because those things have become infrastructure. Which is basically the cloud play, where a lot of this is just becoming infrastructure more and more.Corey: Oh, yeah. Back then I distinctly remember my elders looking down their noses at me because I didn't know assembly, and how could I possibly consider myself a competent systems admin if I didn't at least have a working knowledge of assembly? Or at least C, which I, over time, learned enough about to know that I didn't want to be a C programmer. And you're right, this is the value of cloud and going back to those days getting a web server up and running just to compile Apache's httpd took a week and an in-depth knowledge of GCC flags.And then in time, oh, great. We're going to have rpm or debs. Great, okay, then in time, you have apt, if you're in the dev land because I know you are a Debian developer, but over in Red Hat land, we had yum and other tools. And then in time, it became oh, we can just use something like Puppet or Chef to wind up ensuring that thing is installed. And then oh, just docker run. And now it's a checkbox in a web console for S3.These things get easier with time and step by step by step we're standing on the shoulders of giants. Even in the last ten years of my career, I used to have a great challenge question that I would interview people with of, “Do you know what TinyURL is? It takes a short URL and then expands it to a longer one. Great, on the whiteboard, tell me how you would implement that.” And you could go up one side and down the other, and then you could add constraints, multiple data centers, now one goes offline, how do you not lose data? Et cetera, et cetera.But these days, there are so many ways to do that using cloud services that it almost becomes trivial. It's okay, multiple data centers, API Gateway, a Lambda, and a global DynamoDB table. Now, what? “Well, now it gets slow. Why is it getting slow?”“Well, in that scenario, probably because of something underlying the cloud provider.” “And so now, you lose an entire AWS region. How do you handle that?” “Seems to me when that happens, the entire internet's kind of broken. Do people really need longer URLs?”And that is a valid answer, in many cases. The question doesn't really work without a whole bunch of additional constraints that make it sound fake. And that's not a weakness. That is the fact that computers and cloud services have never been as accessible as they are now. And that's a win for everyone.Richard: There's one aspect of accessibility which is actually decreasing—or two. A, you need to pay for them on an ongoing basis. And B, you need an internet connection which is suitably fast, low latency, what have you. And those are things which actually do make things harder for a variety of reasons. If I look at our back-end systems—as in Grafana—all of them have single binary modes where you literally compile everything into a single binary and you can run it on your laptop because if you're stuck on a plane, you can't do any work on it. That kind of is not the best of situations.And if you have a huge CI/CD pipeline, everything in this cloud and fine and dandy, but your internet breaks. Yeah, so I do agree that it is becoming generally more accessible. I disagree that it is becoming more accessible along all possible axes.Corey: I would agree. There is a silver lining to that as well, where yes, they are fraught and dangerous and I would preface this with a whole bunch of warnings, but from a cost perspective, all of the cloud providers do have a free tier offering where you can kick the tires on a lot of these things in return for no money. Surprisingly, the best one of those is Oracle Cloud where they have an unlimited free tier, use whatever you want in this subset of services, and you will never be charged a dime. As opposed to the AWS model of free tier where well, okay, it suddenly got very popular or you misconfigured something, and surprise, you now owe us enough money to buy Belize. That doesn't usually lead to a great customer experience.But you're right, you can't get away from needing an internet connection of at least some level of stability and throughput in order for a lot of these things to work. The stuff you would do locally on a Raspberry Pi, for example, if your budget constrained and want to get something out here, or your laptop. Great, that's not going to work in the same way as a full-on cloud service will.Richard: It's not free unless you have hard guarantees that you're not going to ever pay anything. It's fine to send warning, it's fine to switch the thing off, it's fine to have you hit random hard and soft quotas. It is not a free service if you can't guarantee that it is free.Corey: I agree with you. I think that there needs to be a free offering where, “Well, okay, you want us to suddenly stop serving traffic to the world?” “Yes. When the alternative is you have to start charging me through the nose, yes I want you to stop serving traffic.” That is definitionally what it says on the tin.And as an independent learner, that is what I want. Conversely, if I'm an enterprise, yeah, I don't care about money; we're running our Superbowl ad right now, so whatever you do, don't stop serving traffic. Charge us all the money. And there's been a lot of hand wringing about, well, how do we figure out which direction to go in? And it's, have you considered asking the customer?So, on a scale of one to bank, how serious is this account going to be [laugh]? Like, what are your big concerns: never charge me or never go down? Because we can build for either of those. Just let's make sure that all of those expectations are aligned. Because if you guess you're going to get it wrong and then no one's going to like you.Richard: I would argue this. All those services from all cloud providers actually build to address both of those. It's a deliberate choice not to offer certain aspects.Corey: Absolutely. When I talk to AWS, like, “Yeah, but there is an eventual consistency challenge in the billing system where it takes”—as anyone who's looked at the billing system can see—“Multiple days, sometimes for usage data to show up. So, how would we be able to stop things if the usage starts climbing?” To which my relatively direct responses, that sounds like a huge problem. I don't know how you'd fix that, but I do know that if suddenly you decide, as a matter of policy, to okay, if you're in the free tier, we will not charge you, or even we will not charge you more than $20 a month.So, you build yourself some headroom, great. And anything that people are able to spin up, well, you're just going to have to eat the cost as a provider. I somehow suspect that would get fixed super quickly if that were the constraint. The fact that it isn't is a conscious choice.Richard: Absolutely.Corey: And the reason I'm so passionate about this, about the free space, is not because I want to get a bunch of things for free. I assure you I do not. I mean, I spend my life fixing AWS bills and looking at AWS pricing, and my argument is very rarely, “It's too expensive.” It's that the billing dimension is hard to predict or doesn't align with a customer's experience or prices a service out of a bunch of use cases where it'll be great. But very rarely do I just sit here shaking my fist and saying, “It costs too much.”The problem is when you scare the living crap out of a student with a surprise bill that's more than their entire college tuition, even if you waive it a week or so later, do you think they're ever going to be as excited as they once were to go and use cloud services and build things for themselves and see what's possible? I mean, you and I met on IRC 20 years ago because back in those days, the failure mode and the risk financially was extremely low. It's yeah, the biggest concern that I had back then when I was doing some of my Linux experimentation is if I typed the wrong thing, I'm going to break my laptop. And yeah, that happened once or twice, and I've learned not to make those same kinds of mistakes, or put guardrails in so the blast radius was smaller, or use a remote system instead. Yeah, someone else's computer that I can destroy. Wonderful. But that was on we live and we learn as we were coming up. There was never an opportunity for us, to my understanding, to wind up accidentally running up an $8 million charge.Richard: Absolutely. And psychological safety is one of the most important things in what most people do. We are social animals. Without this psychological safety, you're not going to have long-term, self-sustaining groups. You will not make someone really excited about it. There's two basic ways to sell: trust or force. Those are the two ones. There's none else.Corey: Managing shards. Maintenance windows. Overprovisioning. ElastiCache bills. I know, I know. It's a spooky season and you're already shaking. It's time for caching to be simpler. Momento Serverless Cache lets you forget the backend to focus on good code and great user experiences. With true autoscaling and a pay-per-use pricing model, it makes caching easy. No matter your cloud provider, get going for free at gomemento.co/screaming That's GO M-O-M-E-N-T-O dot co slash screamingCorey: Yeah. And it also looks ridiculous. I was talking to someone somewhat recently who's used to spending four bucks a month on their AWS bill for some S3 stuff. Great. Good for them. That's awesome. Their credentials got compromised. Yes, that is on them to some extent. Okay, great.But now after six days, they were told that they owed $360,000 to AWS. And I don't know how, as a cloud company, you can sit there and ask a student to do that. That is not a realistic thing. They are what is known, in the United States at least, in the world of civil litigation as quote-unquote, “Judgment proof,” which means, great, you could wind up finding that someone owes you $20 billion. Most of the time, they don't have that, so you're not able to recoup it. Yeah, the judgment feels good, but you're never going to see it.That's the problem with something like that. It's yeah, I would declare bankruptcy long before, as a student, I wound up paying that kind of money. And I don't hear any stories about them releasing the collection agency hounds against people in that scenario. But I couldn't guarantee that. I would never urge someone to ignore that bill and see what happens.And it's such an off-putting thing that, from my perspective, is beneath of the company. And let's be clear, I see this behavior at times on Google Cloud, and I see it on Azure as well. This is not something that is unique to AWS, but they are the 800-pound gorilla in the space, and that's important. Or as I just to mention right now, like, as I—because I was about to give you crap for this, too, but if I go to grafana.com, it says, and I quote, “Play around with the Grafana Stack. Experience Grafana for yourself, no registration or installation needed.”Good. I was about to yell at you if it's, “Oh, just give us your credit card and go ahead and start spinning things up and we won't charge you. Honest.” Even your free account does not require a credit card; you're doing it right. That tells me that I'm not going to get a giant surprise bill.Richard: You have no idea how much thought and work went into our free offering. There was a lot of math involved.Corey: None of this is easy, I want to be very clear on that. Pricing is one of the hardest things to get right, especially in cloud. And it also, when you get it right, it doesn't look like it was that hard for you to do. But I fix [sigh] I people's AWS bills for a living and still, five or six years in, one of the hardest things I still wrestle with is pricing engagements. It's incredibly nuanced, incredibly challenging, and at least for services in the cloud space where you're doing usage-based billing, that becomes a problem.But glancing at your pricing page, you do hit the two things that are incredibly important to me. The first one is use something for free. As an added bonus, you can use it forever. And I can get started with it right now. Great, when I go and look at your pricing page or I want to use your product and it tells me to ‘click here to contact us.' That tells me it's an enterprise sales cycle, it's got to be really expensive, and I'm not solving my problem tonight.Whereas the other side of it, the enterprise offering needs to be ‘contact us' and you do that, that speaks to the enterprise procurement people who don't know how to sign a check that doesn't have to commas in it, and they want to have custom terms and all the rest, and they're prepared to pay for that. If you don't have that, you look to small-time. When it doesn't matter what price you put on it, you wind up offering your enterprise tier at some large number, it's yeah, for some companies, that's a small number. You don't necessarily want to back yourself in, depending upon what the specific needs are. You've gotten that right.Every common criticism that I have about pricing, you folks have gotten right. And I definitely can pick up on your fingerprints on a lot of this. Because it sounds like a weird thing to say of, “Well, he's the Director of Community, why would he weigh in on pricing?” It's, “I don't think you understand what community is when you ask that question.”Richard: Yes, I fully agree. It's super important to get pricing right, or to get many things right. And usually the things which just feel naturally correct are the ones which took the most effort and the most time and everything. And yes, at least from the—like, I was in those conversations or part of them, and the one thing which was always clear is when we say it's free, it must be free. When we say it is forever free, it must be forever free. No games, no lies, do what you say and say what you do. Basically.We have things where initially you get certain pro features and you can keep paying and you can keep using them, or after X amount of time they go away. Things like these are built in because that's what people want. They want to play around with the whole thing and see, hey, is this actually providing me value? Do I want to pay for this feature which is nice or this and that plugin or what have you? And yeah, you're also absolutely right that once you leave these constraints of basically self-serve cloud, you are talking about bespoke deals, but you're also talking about okay, let's sit down, let's actually understand what your business is: what are your business problems? What are you going to solve today? What are you trying to solve tomorrow?Let us find a way of actually supporting you and invest into a mutual partnership and not just grab the money and run. We have extremely low churn for, I would say, pretty good reasons. Because this thing about our users, our customers being successful, we do take it extremely seriously.Corey: It's one of those areas that I just can't shake the feeling is underappreciated industry-wide. And the reason I say that this is your fingerprints on it is because if this had been wrong, you have a lot of… we'll call them idiosyncrasies, where there are certain things you absolutely will not stand for, and misleading people and tricking them into paying money is high on that list. One of the reasons we're friends. So yeah, but I say I see your fingerprints on this, it's yeah, if this hadn't been worked out the way that it is, you would not still be there. One other thing that I wanted to call out about, well, I guess it's a confluence of pricing and logging in the rest, I look at your free tier, and it offers up to 50 gigabytes of ingest a month.And it's easy for me to sit here and compare that to other services, other tools, and other logging stories, and then I have to stop and think for a minute that yeah, discs have gotten way bigger, and internet connections have gotten way faster, and even the logs have gotten way wordier. I still am not sure that most people can really contextualize just how much logging fits into 50 gigs of data. Do you have any, I guess, ballpark examples of what that looks like? Because it's been long enough since I've been playing in these waters that I can't really contextualize it anymore.Richard: Lord of the Rings is roughly five megabytes. It's actually less. So, we're talking literally 10,000 Lord of the Rings, which you can just shove in us and we're just storing this for you. Which also tells you that you're not going to be reading any of this. Or some of it, yes, but not all of it. You need better tooling and you need proper tooling.And some of this is more modern. Some of this is where we actually pushed the state of the art. But I'm also biased. But I, for myself, do claim that we did push the state of the art here. But at the same time you come back to those absolute fundamentals of how humans deal with data.If you look back basically as far as we have writing—literally 6000 years ago, is the oldest writing—humans have always dealt with information with the state of the world in very specific ways. A, is it important enough to even write it down, to even persist it in whatever persistence mechanisms I have at my disposal? If yes, write a detailed account or record a detailed account of whatever the thing is. But it turns out, this is expensive and it's not what you need. So, over time, you optimize towards only taking down key events and only noting key events. Maybe with their interconnections, but fundamentally, the key events.As your data grows, as you have more stuff, as this still is important to your business and keeps being more important to—or doesn't even need to be a business; can be social, can be whatever—whatever thing it is, it becomes expensive, again, to retain all of those key events. So, you turn them into numbers and you can do actual math on them. And that's this path which you've seen again, and again, and again, and again, throughout humanity's history. Literally, as long as we have written records, this has played out again, and again, and again, and again, for every single field which humans actually cared about. At different times, like, power networks are way ahead of this, but fundamentally power networks work on metrics, but for transient load spike, and everything, they have logs built into their power measurement devices, but those are only far in between. Of course, the main thing is just metrics, time-series. And you see this again, and again.You also were sysadmin in internet-related all switches have been metrics-based or metrics-first for basically forever, for 20, 30 years. But that stands to reason. Of course the internet is running at by roughly 20 years scale-wise in front of the cloud because obviously you need the internet because as you wouldn't be having a cloud. So, all of those growing pains why metrics are all of a sudden the thing, “Or have been for a few years now,” is basically, of course, people who were writing software, providing their own software services, hit the scaling limitations which you hit for Internet service providers two decades, three decades ago. But fundamentally, you have this complete system. Basically profiles or distributed tracing depending on how you view distributed tracing.You can also argue that distributed tracing is key events which are linked to each other. Logs sit firmly in the key event thing and then you turn this into numbers and that is metrics. And that's basically it. You have extremes at the and where you can have valid, depending on your circumstances, engineering trade-offs of where you invest the most, but fundamentally, that is why those always appear again in humanity's dealing with data, and observability is no different.Corey: I take a look at last month's AWS bill. Mine is pretty well optimized. It's a bit over 500 bucks. And right around 150 of that is various forms of logging and detecting change in the environment. And on the one hand, I sit here, and I think, “Oh, I should optimize that,” because the value of those logs to me is zero.Except that whenever I have to go in and diagnose something or respond to an incident or have some forensic exploration, they then are worth an awful lot. And I am prepared to pay 150 bucks a month for that because the potential value of having that when the time comes is going to be extraordinarily useful. And it basically just feels like a tax on top of what it is that I'm doing. The same thing happens with application observability where, yeah, when you just want the big substantial stuff, yeah, until you're trying to diagnose something. But in some cases, yeah, okay, then crank up the verbosity and then look for it.But if you're trying to figure it out after an event that isn't likely or hopefully won't recur, you're going to wish that you spent a little bit more on collecting data out of it. You're always going to be wrong, you're always going to be unhappy, on some level.Richard: Ish. You could absolutely be optimizing this. I mean, for $500, it's probably not worth your time unless you take it as an exercise, but outside of due diligence where you need specific logs tied to—or specific events tied to specific times, I would argue that a lot of the problems with logs is just dealing with it wrong. You have this one extreme of full-text indexing everything, and you have this other extreme of a data lake—which is just a euphemism of never looking at the data again—to keep storage vendors happy. There is an in between.Again, I'm biased, but like for example, with Loki, you have those same label sets as you have on your metrics with Prometheus, and you have literally the same, which means you only index that part and you only extract on ingestion time. If you don't have structured logs yet, only put the metadata about whatever you care about extracted and put it into your label set and store this, and that's the only thing you index. But it goes further than just this. You can also turn those logs into metrics.And to me this is a path of optimization. Where previously I logged this and that error. Okay, fine, but it's just a log line telling me it's HTTP 500. No one cares that this is at this precise time. Log levels are also basically an anti-pattern because they're just trying to deal with the amount of data which I have, and try and get a handle on this on that level whereas it would be much easier if I just counted every time I have an HTTP 500, I just up my counter by one. And again, and again, and again.And all of a sudden, I have literally—and I did the math on this—over 99.8% of the data which I have to store just goes away. It's just magic the way—and we're only talking about the first time I'm hitting this logline. The second time I'm hitting this logline is functionally free if I turn this into metrics. It becomes cheap enough that one of the mantras which I have, if you need to onboard your developers on modern observability, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the whole bells and whistles, usually people have logs, like that's what they have, unless they were from ISPs or power companies, or so; there they usually start with metrics.But most users, which I see both with my Grafana and with my Prometheus [unintelligible 00:38:46] tend to start with logs. They have issues with those logs because they're basically unstructured and useless and you need to first make them useful to some extent. But then you can leverage on this and instead of having a debug statement, just put a counter. Every single time you think, “Hey, maybe I should put a debug statement,” just put a counter instead. In two months time, see if it was worth it or if you delete that line and just remove that counter.It's so much cheaper, you can just throw this on and just have it run for a week or a month or whatever timeframe and done. But it goes beyond this because all of a sudden, if I can turn my logs into metrics properly, I can start rewriting my alerts on those metrics. I can actually persist those metrics and can more aggressively throw my logs away. But also, I have this transition made a lot easier where I don't have this huge lift, where this day in three months is to be cut over and we're going to release the new version of this and that software and it's not going to have that, it's going to have 80% less logs and everything will be great and then you missed the first maintenance window or someone is ill or what have you, and then the next Big Friday is coming so you can't actually deploy there. I mean Black Friday. But we can also talk about deploying on Fridays.But the thing is, you have this huge thing, whereas if you have this as a continuous improvement process, I can just look at, this is the log which is coming out. I turn this into a number, I start emitting metrics directly, and I see that those numbers match. And so, I can just start—I build new stuff, I put it into a new data format, I actually emit the new data format directly from my code instrumentation, and only then do I start removing the instrumentation for the logs. And that allows me to, with full confidence, with psychological safety, just move a lot more quickly, deliver much more quickly, and also cut down on my costs more quickly because I'm just using more efficient data types.Corey: I really want to thank you for spending as much time as you have. If people want to learn more about how you view the world and figure out what other personal attacks they can throw your way, where's the best place for them to find you?Richard: Personal attacks, probably Twitter. It's, like, the go-to place for this kind of thing. For actually tracking, I stopped maintaining my own website. Maybe I'll do again, but if you go on github.com/ritchieh/talks, you'll find a reasonably up-to-date list of all the talks, interviews, presentations, panels, what have you, which I did over the last whatever amount of time. [laugh].Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:41:23]. Thanks again for your time. It's always appreciated.Richard: And thank you.Corey: Richard Hartmann, Director of Community at Grafana Labs. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment. And then when someone else comes along with an insulting comment they want to add, we'll just increment the counter by one.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

You can't see the bright light of the lamp without plugging it into its source, right? It's the same with us– we can't truly shine in this life if we do not anchor ourselves into the true source of light. In this quick episode, Charity will share about plugging into the source for you to shine. I have no doubt that you are here listening, it's not a mistake that you are here. Share this with a friend or two! Key Takeaway: Are you plugged into the source of light? Activating/ plugging back your life to the source of everything before we can shine Choosing the awareness and the remembrance that He is the source  Links:  https://www.wearemeantformore.com/live WeAreMeantForMore.com/moment  _______________________________________   If you want to share your story on the "Meant For More Podcast," text the word "MOMENT" to 833-231-8098 to submit your story and have Charity read it on the podcast and give you a shoutout! To join the Meant For More Community, text the word “COMMUNITY” to 833-231-8098 to learn more…   Text Charity the word "DEVO" to 833-231-8098 for 5 FREE texted daily devotionals with her new devotional card deck.   Grab Charity's DevoDeck by going to DevoDeck.com Be sure to visit my website at CharityMajors.com And come hang out with me on social media -  @CharityMajors on Instagram and Charity Majors on Facebook.   https://www.instagram.com/charitymajors/ https://www.facebook.com/CharityMajorsFanPage/   Join my FREE FB Group: http://www.charitymajors.com/meantformoretribe   I look forward to connecting with you!   xoxo - Charity   Terms & Conditions   -----------------------------------------------------   ***If you are feeling STRESSED and are struggling with anxiety, please download Charity's FREE "Reduce Stress Guided Meditation" - http://charitymajors.com/reducestress   ***If you desire to place your identity on a firm foundation, grab Charity's "DevoDeck" - a deck of devotional cards, rooted in the identity of who and whose you are.  Go to http://devodeck.com/    Grab your copy of my book (and #1 New Release), "Meant For More; Igniting Your Purpose In a World That Tries to Dim Your Light... go to http://book.wearemeantformore.com/ today!  ==============================  

As followers of Christ, we are called to love God and to love others, which is why your friends and the people around you, matter. Not just that, through the community, is where we get really incredible healing. In this episode, Charity will talk about the value of having a circle of friends and how you can still create a meaningful community even when you feel paralyzed. Don't miss out on this episode and find out how you can better cherish the people and community around you!   Key Takeaway: Having a circle of friends whom you surround yourself with and why it matters Having a boundary that you have set up for yourself and for your personal, physical, emotional, and spiritual health Whom do you allow in and out your life? How do people move in and out of different circles of closeness and intimacy?   Links:  https://www.wearemeantformore.com/live WeAreMeantForMore.com/moment  _______________________________________   If you want to share your story on the "Meant For More Podcast," text the word "MOMENT" to 833-231-8098 to submit your story and have Charity read it on the podcast and give you a shoutout! To join the Meant For More Community, text the word “COMMUNITY” to 833-231-8098 to learn more…   Text Charity the word "DEVO" to 833-231-8098 for 5 FREE texted daily devotionals with her new devotional card deck.   Grab Charity's DevoDeck by going to DevoDeck.com Be sure to visit my website at CharityMajors.com And come hang out with me on social media -  @CharityMajors on Instagram and Charity Majors on Facebook.   https://www.instagram.com/charitymajors/ https://www.facebook.com/CharityMajorsFanPage/   Join my FREE FB Group: http://www.charitymajors.com/meantformoretribe   I look forward to connecting with you!   xoxo - Charity   Terms & Conditions   -----------------------------------------------------   ***If you are feeling STRESSED and are struggling with anxiety, please download Charity's FREE "Reduce Stress Guided Meditation" - http://charitymajors.com/reducestress   ***If you desire to place your identity on a firm foundation, grab Charity's "DevoDeck" - a deck of devotional cards, rooted in the identity of who and whose you are.  Go to http://devodeck.com/    Grab your copy of my book (and #1 New Release), "Meant For More; Igniting Your Purpose In a World That Tries to Dim Your Light... go to http://book.wearemeantformore.com/ today!  ==============================

God communicates with us in various ways so that he can fill us with His love and presence. We can hear His voice and feel the Holy Spirit; all we have to do is listen, afterall he never fails to whisper  to us. In this episode, Charity will preach about her experience at the beach and how the Holy Spirit reminded her of the thoughts of the sand. She will share about God's love and what it feels being loved God. Today, I am inviting you to listen to this special episode, and be reminded that God is everywhere and He is whispering to you too. Tune in and enjoy!   Key Takeaway: Reminder from the Holy Spirit about the thoughts of sand towards me with Psalms 139:17  What are the love of God towards us and How God's love is 1 John 4:7-11? Encountering the whisper of the Holy Spirit God is not just a love but He also likes to be with His people.   Links:    https://www.wearemeantformore.com/live WeAreMeantForMore.com/moment  _______________________________________   If you want to share your story on the "Meant For More Podcast," text the word "MOMENT" to 833-231-8098 to submit your story and have Charity read it on the podcast and give you a shoutout! To join the Meant For More Community, text the word “COMMUNITY” to 833-231-8098 to learn more…   Text Charity the word "DEVO" to 833-231-8098 for 5 FREE texted daily devotionals with her new devotional card deck.   Grab Charity's DevoDeck by going to DevoDeck.com Be sure to visit my website at CharityMajors.com And come hang out with me on social media -  @CharityMajors on Instagram and Charity Majors on Facebook.   https://www.instagram.com/charitymajors/ https://www.facebook.com/CharityMajorsFanPage/   Join my FREE FB Group: http://www.charitymajors.com/meantformoretribe   I look forward to connecting with you!   xoxo - Charity   Terms & Conditions   -----------------------------------------------------   ***If you are feeling STRESSED and are struggling with anxiety, please download Charity's FREE "Reduce Stress Guided Meditation" - http://charitymajors.com/reducestress   ***If you desire to place your identity on a firm foundation, grab Charity's "DevoDeck" - a deck of devotional cards, rooted in the identity of who and whose you are.  Go to http://devodeck.com/    Grab your copy of my book (and #1 New Release), "Meant For More; Igniting Your Purpose In a World That Tries to Dim Your Light... go to http://book.wearemeantformore.com/ today!  ==============================

Have you ever felt as if God had forgotten about you in the midst of your entire breakdown? Changing your perspective from being stuck with the hardest time to moving forward in a healthy way to have courage by seeking out to be more proactive about the thoughts that are taking you captive is the best thing that you need to do so that you will become a better person. In this episode, Jordan Dooley will join us today to discuss how her still life goes on despite the hardship and how she overcame that moment. She also talks about the important things that have to be prioritized in this season of life. I know you're going to love this episode, so grab your favorite mug and curl up or take a walk wherever you are and just tune in to this because this is made for you!   Bio: Jordan Dooley is a bestselling author. She's an ambitious go-getter with big dreams and a strong desire to succeed. She founded an incredible business in her 20s where they were building a lot of really great programs and products and a lot of different things. She had the chance to reconsider what was most important to her. It set her on a journey to a healthier, more intentional way of living and reminded her that success is not about achieving a goal or climbing a mountain day in and day out, but rather stewardship and small steps that add up day after day.   Key Takeaway: Walking through a lot of suffering in a very short of time and having a different kind of feelings in that moment Pulling and tugging the grief and lies that are rooted like weeds in your life, heart and mind can make you stuck What were some of the things where you can see a shift from the moment of pulling those weeds in your life? How to take the hardest time that you went through in your life What to do when you're in the middle of circumstances while achieving your goal or your dream? Re-evaluating the present priority opportunities to create a time frame for the perspective plan Links:  https://www.instagram.com/jordanleedooley/ https://www.instagram.com/theownitacademy/ https://jordanleedooley.com/links/ https://jordanleedooley.com/podcast/    People mentioned: Greg McCowan  https://www.wearemeantformore.com/live WeAreMeantForMore.com/moment  _______________________________________   If you want to share your story on the "Meant For More Podcast," text the word "MOMENT" to 833-231-8098 to submit your story and have Charity read it on the podcast and give you a shoutout! To join the Meant For More Community, text the word “COMMUNITY” to 833-231-8098 to learn more…   Text Charity the word "DEVO" to 833-231-8098 for 5 FREE texted daily devotionals with her new devotional card deck.   Grab Charity's DevoDeck by going to DevoDeck.com Be sure to visit my website at CharityMajors.com And come hang out with me on social media -  @CharityMajors on Instagram and Charity Majors on Facebook.   https://www.instagram.com/charitymajors/ https://www.facebook.com/CharityMajorsFanPage/   Join my FREE FB Group: http://www.charitymajors.com/meantformoretribe   I look forward to connecting with you!   xoxo - Charity   Terms & Conditions   -----------------------------------------------------   ***If you are feeling STRESSED and are struggling with anxiety, please download Charity's FREE "Reduce Stress Guided Meditation" - http://charitymajors.com/reducestress   ***If you desire to place your identity on a firm foundation, grab Charity's "DevoDeck" - a deck of devotional cards, rooted in the identity of who and whose you are.  Go to http://devodeck.com/    Grab your copy of my book (and #1 New Release), "Meant For More; Igniting Your Purpose In a World That Tries to Dim Your Light... go to http://book.wearemeantformore.com/ today!  ==============================

Steph and Chris are recording together! Like, in the same room, physically together. Chris talks about slowly evolving the architecture in an app they're working on and settling on directory structure. Steph's still working on migrating unit tests over to RSpec. They answer a listener question: "As senior-level developers, how do you set goals to ensure that you keep growing?" This episode is brought to you by BuildPulse (https://buildpulse.io/bikeshed). Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today. Faking External Services In Tests With Adapters (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/faking-external-services-in-tests-with-adapters) Testing Third-Party Interactions (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/testing-third-party-interactions) Jen Dary - On Future Goals (https://www.beplucky.com/on-future-goals/) Charity Majors - The Engineer Manager Pedulum (https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/) Charity Majors Bike Shed Episode (https://www.bikeshed.fm/302) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, hey, Chris, what's new in your world? CHRIS: What is new in my world? Actually, this episode feels different. There's something different about it. I can't quite put my finger on it. I think it may be that we're actually physically in the same room recording for the first time in two years and a little bit more, which is wild. STEPH: I can't believe it's been that long. I feel like it wasn't that long ago that we were in The Bike Shed...oh, I said The Bike Shed studio. I'm being very biased. Our recording studio [laughs] is the more proper description for it. Yeah, two and a half years. And we tried to make this happen a couple of months ago when I was visiting Boston, and then it just didn't work out. But today, we made it. CHRIS: Today, we made it. Here we are. So hopefully, the audio sounds great, and we get all that more richness in conversation because of the physical in-person manner. We're trying it out. It'll be fun. But let's see, to the normal tech talk and nonsense, what's new in my world? So we've been slowly evolving the architecture in the app that we're working on. And we settled on something that I kind of like, so I wanted to talk about it, directory structure, probably the most interesting topic in the world. I think there's some good stuff in here. So we have the normal stuff. There are app models, app controllers, all those; those make sense. We have app jobs which right now, I would say, is in a state of flux. We're in the sad place where some things are application records, and some things are Sidekiq workers. We have made the decision to consolidate everything onto Sidekiq workers, which is just strictly more powerful as to the direction we're going to go. But for right now, I'm not super happy with the state of app jobs, but whatever, we have that. But the things that I like so we have app commands; I've talked about app commands before. Those are command objects. They use dry-rb do notation, and they allow us to sequence a bunch of things that all may fail, and we can process them all in a much more reasonable way. It's been really interesting exploring that, building on it, introducing it to new developers who haven't worked in that mode before. And everyone who's come into the project has both picked it up very quickly and enjoyed it, and found it to be a nice expressive mode. So app commands very happy with that. App queries is another one that we have. We've talked about this before, query objects. I know we're a big fan. [laughs] I got a golf clap across the room here, which I could see live in person. It was amazing. I could feel the wind wafting across the room from the golf clap. [chuckles] But yeah, query objects, they're fantastic. They take a relation, they return a relation, but they allow us to build more complex queries outside of our models. The new one, here we go. So this stuff would all normally fall into app services, which services don't mean anything. So we do not have an app services directory in our application. But the new one that we have is app clients. So these are all of our HTTP clients wrapping external third parties that we're interacting with. But with each of them, we've taken a particular structure, a particular approach. So for each of them, we're using the adapter pattern. There's a blog post on the Giant Robots blog that I can point to that sort of speaks to the adapter pattern that we're using here. But basically, in production mode, there is an HTTP backend that actually makes the real requests and does all that stuff. And in test mode, there is a test backend for each of these clients that allows us to build up a pretty representative fake, and so we're faking it up before the HTTP layer. But we found that that's a good trade-off for us. And then we can say, like, if this fake backend gets a request to /users, then we can respond in whatever way that we want. And overall, we found that pattern to be really fantastic. We've been very happy with it. So it's one more thing. All of them were just gathering in-app models. And so it was only very recently that we said no, no, these deserve their own name. They are a pattern. We've repeated this pattern a bunch. We like this pattern. We want to even embrace this pattern more, so long live app clients. STEPH: I love it. I love app clients. It's been a while since I've been on a project that had that directory. But there was a greenfield project that I was working on. I think it might have been I was working with Boston.rb and working on giving them a new site or something like that and introduced app clients. And what you just said is perfect in terms of you've identified a pattern, and then you captured that and gave it its own directory to say, "Hey, this is our pattern. We've established it, and we really like it." That sounds awesome. It's also really nice as someone who's new to a codebase; if I jump in and if I look at app clients, I can immediately see what are the third parties that we're working with? And that feels really nice. So yeah, that sounds great. I'm into it. CHRIS: Yeah, I think it really was the question of like, is this a pattern we want to embrace and highlight within the codebase, or is this sort of a duplication but irrelevant like not really that important? And we decided no, this is a thing that matters. We currently have 17 of these clients, so 17 different third-party external things that we're integrating with. So for someone who doesn't really like service-oriented architecture, I do seem to have found myself in a place. But here we are, you know, we do what we have to with what we're given. But yes, 17 and growing our app clients. STEPH: That is a lot. [laughs] My eyes widened a bit when you said 17. I'm curious because you highlighted that app services that's not really a thing. Like, it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't have the same meaning of the app queries directory or app commands or app clients where it's like, this is a pattern we've identified, and named, and want to propagate. For app services, I agree; it's that junk drawer. But I guess in some ways...well, I'm going to say something, and then I'm going to decide how I feel about it. That feels useful because then, if you have something but you haven't established a pattern for it, you need a place for it to go. It still needs to live somewhere. And you don't necessarily want to put it in app models. So I'm curious, where do you put stuff that doesn't have an established pattern yet? CHRIS: It's a good question. I think it's probably app models is our current answer. Like, these are things that model stuff. And I'm a big believer in the it doesn't need to be an application record-backed object to go on app models. But slowly, we've been taking stuff out. I think it'd be very common for what we talk about as query objects to just be methods in the respective application record. So the user record, as a great example, has all of these methods for doing any sort of query that you might want to do. And I'm a fan of extracting that out into this very specific place called app queries. Commands are now another thing that I think very typically would fall into the app services place. Jobs naming that is something different. Clients we've got serializers is another one that we have at the top level, so those are four. We use Blueprinter within the app. And again, it's sort of weird. We don't really have an API. We're using Inertia. So we are still serializing to JSON across the boundary. And we found it was useful to encapsulate that. And so we have serializers as a directory, but they just do that. We do have policies. We're using Pundit for authorization, so that's another one that we have. But yeah, I think the junk drawerness probably most goes to app models. But at this point, more and more, I feel like we have a place to put things. It's relatively clear should this be in a controller, or should this be in a query object, or should this be in a command? I think I'm finding a place of happiness that, frankly, I've been searching for for a long time. You could say my whole life I've been searching for this contented state of I think I know where stuff goes in the app, mostly, most of the time. I'm just going to say this, and now that you've asked the excellent question of like, yeah, but no, where are you hiding some stuff? I'm going to open up models. Next week I'm going to be like, oh, I forgot about all of that nonsense. But the things that we have defined I'm very happy with. STEPH: That feels really fair for app models. Because like you said, I agree that it doesn't need to be ActiveRecord-backed to go on app models. And so, if it needs to live somewhere, do you add a junk drawer, or do you just create app models and reuse that? And I think it makes a lot of sense to repurpose app models or to let things slide in there until you can extract them and let them live there until there's a pattern that you see. CHRIS: We do. There's one more that I find hilarious, which is app lib, which my understanding...I remember at one point having one of those afternoons where I'm just like, I thought stuff works, but stuff doesn't seem to work. I thought lib was a directory in Rails apps. And it was like, oh no, now we autoload only under the app. So you should put lib under app. And I was just like, okay, whatever. So we have app lib with very little in it. [laughs] But that isn't so much a junk drawer as it is stuff that's like, this doesn't feel specific to us. This goes somewhere else. This could be extracted from the app. But I just find it funny that we have an app lib. It just seems wrong. STEPH: That feels like one of those directories that I've just accepted. Like, it's everywhere. It's like in all the apps that I work in. And so I've become very accustomed to it, and I haven't given it the same thoughtfulness that I think you have. I'm just like, yeah, it's another place to look. It's another place to go find some stuff. And then if I'm adding to it, yeah, I don't think I've been as thoughtful about it. But that makes sense that it's kind of silly that we have it, and that becomes like the junk drawer. If you're not careful with it, that's where you stick things. CHRIS: I appreciate you're describing my point of view as thoughtfulness. I feel like I may actually be burdened with historical knowledge here because I worked on Rails apps long, long ago when lib didn't go in-app, and now it does. And I'm like, wait a minute, but like, no, no, it's fine. These are the libraries within your app. I can tell that story. So, again, thank you for saying that I was being thoughtful. I think I was just being persnickety, and get off my lawn is probably where I was at. STEPH: Oh, full persnicketiness. Ooh, that's tough to say. [laughs] CHRIS: But yeah, I just wanted to share that little summary, particularly the app clients is an interesting one. And again, I'll share the adapter pattern blog post because I think it's worked really well for us. And it's allowed us to slowly build up a more robust test suite. And so now our feature specs do a very good job of simulating the reality of the world while also dealing with the fact that we have these 17 external situations that we have to interact with. And so, how do you balance that VCR versus other things? We've talked about this a bunch of times on different episodes. But app clients has worked great with the adapter pattern, so once more, rounding out our organizational approach. But yeah, that's what's up in my world. What's up in your world? STEPH: So I have a small update to give. But before I do, you just made me think of something in regards to that article that talks about the adapter pattern. And there's also another article that's by Joël Quenneville that's testing third-party interactions. And he made me reflect on a time where I was giving the RSpec course, and we were talking about different ways to test third-party interactions. And there are a couple of different ways that are mentioned in this article. There are stub methods on adapter, stub HTTP request, stub request to fake adapter, and stub HTTP request to fake service. All that sounds like a lot. But if you read through the article, then it gives an example of each one. But I've found it really helpful that if you're in a space that you still don't feel great about testing third-party interactions and you're not sure which approach to take; if you work with one API and apply all four different strategies, it really helps cement how to work through that process and the different benefits of each approach and the trade-offs. And we did that during the RSpec course, and I found it really helpful just from the teacher perspective to go through each one. And there were some great questions and discussions that came out of it. So I wanted to put that plug out there in the world that if you're struggling testing third-party interactions, we'll include a link to this article. But I think that's a really solid way to build a great foundation of, like, I know how to test a third-party app. Let me choose which strategy that I want to use. Circling back to what's going on in my world, I am still working on migrating unit tests over to RSpec. It's a thing. It's part of the work that I do. [laughs] I can't say it's particularly enjoyable, but it will have a positive payoff. And along that journey, I've learned some things or rediscovered some things. One of them is read expectations very carefully. So when I was migrating a test over to RSpec, I read it as where we expected a record to exist. The test was actually testing that a record did not exist. And so I probably spent an hour understanding, going through the code being like, why isn't this record getting created like I expect it to? And I finally went back, and I took a break, and I went back. And I was like, oh, crap, I read the expectation wrong. So read expectations very carefully. The other one...this one's not learned, but it is reinforced. Mystery Guests are awful. So as I've been porting over the behavior over to RSpec, the other tests are using fixtures, and I'm moving that over to use factorybot instead. And at first, I was trying to be minimal with the data that I was bringing over. That failed pretty spectacularly. So I have learned now that I have to go and copy everything that's in the fixtures, and then I move it over to factorybot. And it's painful, but at least then I'm doing that thing that we talked about before where I'm trying to load as little context as possible for each test. But then once I do have a green test, I'm going back through it, and I'm like, okay, we probably don't care about when you were created. We probably don't care when you're updated because every field is set for every single record. So I am going back and then playing a game of if I remove this line, does the test still pass? And if I remove that line, does the test still pass? And so far, that has been painful, but it does have the benefit of then I'm removing some of the setup. So Mystery Guests are very painful. I've also discovered that custom error messages can be tricky because I brought over some tests. And some of these, I'm realizing, are more user error than anything else. Anywho, I added one of the custom error messages that you can add, and I added it over to RSpec. But I had written an incorrect, invalid statement in RSpec where I was looking...I was expecting for a record to exist. But I was using the find by instead of where. So you can call exist on the ActiveRecord relation but not on the actual record that gets returned. But I had the custom error message that was popping up and saying, "Oh, your record wasn't found," and I just kept getting that. So I was then diving through the code to understand again why my record wasn't found. And once I removed that custom error message, I realized that it was actually because of how I'd written the RSpec assertion that was wrong because then RSpec gave me a wonderful message that was like, hey, you're trying to call exist on this record, and you can't do that. Instead, you need to call it on a relation. So I've also learned don't bring over custom error messages until you have a green test, and even then, consider if it's helpful because, frankly, the custom error message wasn't that helpful. It was very similar to what RSpec was going to tell us in general. So there was really no need to add that custom step to it. For the final bit that I've learned or the hurdle that I've been facing is that migrating tests descriptions are hard unless they map over. So RSpec has the context and then a description for it that goes with the test. Test::Unit has methods like method names instead. So it may be something like test redemption codes, and then it runs through the code. Well, as I'm trying to migrate that knowledge over to RSpec, it's not clear to me what we're testing. Okay, we're testing redemption codes. What about them? Should they pass? Should they fail? Should they change? What are they redeeming? There's very little context. So a lot of my tests are copying that method name, so I know which tests I'm focused on, and I'm bringing over. And then in the description, it's like, Steph needs help adding a test description, and then I'm pushing that up and then going to the team for help. So they can help me look through to understand, like, what is it that this test is doing? What's important about this domain? What sort of terminology should I include? And that has been working, but I didn't see that coming as part of this whole migrating stuff over. I really thought this might be a little bit more of a copypasta job. And I have learned some trickery is afoot. And it's been more complicated than I thought it was going to be. CHRIS: Well, at a minimum, I can say thank you for sharing all of your hard-learned lessons throughout this process. This does sound arduous, but hopefully, at the end of it, there will be a lot of value and a cleaned-up test suite and all of those sorts of things. But yeah, it's been an adventure you've been on. So on behalf of the people who you are sharing all of these things with, thank you. STEPH: Well, thank you. Yeah, I'm hoping this is very niche knowledge that there aren't many people in the world that are doing this exact work that this happens to be what this team needs. So yeah, it's been an adventure. I've certainly learned some things from it, and I still have more to go. So not there yet, but I'm also excited for when we can actually then delete this portion of the build process. And then also, I think, get rid of fixtures because I didn't think about that from the beginning either. 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Pivoting just a bit, there's a listener question that I'm really excited for us to dive into. And this listener question comes from Joël Quenneville. Hey, Joël. All right, so Joël writes in, "As senior-level developers, how do you set goals to ensure that you keep growing? How do you know what are high-value areas for you to improve? How do you stay sharp? Do you just keep adding new languages to your tool belt? Do you pull back and try to dig into more theoretical concepts? Do you feel like you have enough tech skills and pivot to other things like communication or management skills? At the start of a dev career, there's an overwhelming list of things that it feels like you need to know all at once. Eventually, there comes a point where you no longer feel like you're drowning under the list of things that you need to learn. You're at least moderately competent in all the core concepts. So what's next?" This is a big, fun, scary question. I really like this question. Thank you, Joël, for sending it in because I think there's so much here that can be discussed. I can kick us off with a few thoughts. I want to first highlight one of the things that...or one of the things that resonates with me from this question is how Joël describes going through and reaching senior status how it can really feel like working through a backlog of features. So as a developer, I want to understand this particular framework, or as a developer, I want to be able to write clear and fast tests, or as a developer, I want to contribute to an open-source project. But now that that backlog is empty, you're wondering what's next on your roadmap, which is where I think that sort of big, fun scariness comes into play. So the first idea is to take a moment and embrace that success. You have probably worked really hard to get where you're at in your career. And there's nothing wrong with taking a pause and enjoying the view and just being appreciative of the fact that you are able to get your work done quickly or that you feel very confident in the work that you're doing. Growth is often very important to our careers, but I also think it's important to recognize when you've achieved certain growth and then, if you want to, just enjoy that and pause. And you're not constantly pushing yourself to the next level. I think that is a totally reasonable and healthy thing to do. The second thing that comes to mind is that you're on a Choose Your Own Adventure mode now, so you get to...I would encourage folks, once you've reached this stage, to reflect on where you're at and consider what is your dream? What are your aspirations? Maybe they're related to tech; maybe they're not. And consider where is it that you want to go next? And then, what are the concrete steps that will help you achieve those goals? So there's a really great article by Jen Dary, who's a career coach and owner of Plucky Manager Training, that describes this process. And there's a really great blog post that I'll be sure to include a link to in the show notes. But she has a couple of great questions that will then help you identify, like, what are my goals? Some of those questions are, "If I could do anything and money wasn't an object, I'd spend my time doing dot dot dot." And that doesn't necessarily mean sitting on a beach with your toes in the sand all day. I mean, it could, but then that probably just means you need a vacation. So take the vacation. And then, once you start to get bored, where does your mind start to wander? What are the things that you want to do? Where are you interested in spending your time? And then, once you have an idea of how you'd like to spend your time, you can consider what actions you could take next that will point you in that direction. There's also the benefit that by this point, you probably have an idea of the type of things that you like to do and where you like to spend your time. And so you can figure out which areas of expertise you want to invest in. So do you like more greenfield projects? Do you like architecture discussions? Do you like giving talks? Do you like teaching? Or maybe you're interested in management. I think there's also a more concrete approach that you can take that. You can just talk to your managers in your team and say, "Hey, what big, hard problems are you looking to solve? And then, you can get some inspiration from them and see if their problems align with your interests. Maybe it's not even your own team, but you can talk to other companies and see what other problems industries are trying to solve. That might be an area that then spurs some curiosity or some interest. And then, where do you feel underutilized? So with your current day-to-day, are there areas where you feel that you wish you had more responsibilities or more opportunities, but you feel like you don't have access to those opportunities? Maybe that's an area to explore as well. This feels like a wonderful coaching question in terms of you have done it; congratulations. You've reached a really great spot in your career. And so now you're figuring out that big next step. This is going to be highly customized to each person to then figuring out what it is that's going to help you feel fulfilled over the next five years, ten years, however long you want to project out. Those are some of my thoughts. How about you? What do you think? CHRIS: Well, first, those are some great thoughts. I appreciate that I get to follow them now. It's going to be a hard act to follow. But yeah, I think Joël has asked a fantastic question. And coming from Joël, I know how intentional and thoughtful a learner, and sharer, and teacher and all of these things are. So it's all the more sort of framed in that for me knowing Joël personally. I think to start, the kernel of the question is as senior developers, that's the like...or senior level developers is the way Joël phrased it, but it treats it as sort of this discrete moment in time, which I think there's maybe even something to unpack. And I think we've probably talked about this in previous episodes, but like, what does that even mean? And I think part of the story here is going from reactive where it's like, I don't know how anything works. I know a little bit. I can code some. And every day, I'm presented with new problems that I just don't understand. And I'm trying to build up that base of knowledge. Slowly, you know, you start, and it's like 95% of the time you feel like that. And slowly, the dial switches over, and maybe it's only 25% of the time you feel like that. Somewhere along that spectrum is the line of senior developer. I don't actually know where it is, but it's somewhere in there. And so I think it's that space where you can move from reactive learning things as necessitated by the work that's coming at you to I want to proactively choose the things that I want to be learning to try and expand the stuff that I know, and the ways that I can think about the work without being in direct response to a piece of work coming at me. So with that in mind, what do you do with this proactive space? And I think the way Joël frames the question, again, to what I know of Joël, he's such an intentional person. And I wouldn't be surprised if Joël is very purposeful and thinks about this and has approached it as a specific thing that he's doing. I have certainly been in more of “I'll figure it out when I get there.” I'll explore. Or actually, probably the most pointed thing that I did was I joined a consultancy. And that was a very purposeful choice early on in my career because I'm like, I think I know a little bit. I don't think I know a lot. I would like to know a lot. That seems fun. So what do I think is the best way to do that? My guess, and it turned out to be very much true, is if I join a consultancy, I'm going to see a bunch of different projects, different types of technologies, organizations, communication structure, stuff that works, stuff that doesn't work. And to be honest, I actually thought I would try out the consultancy thing for a little while, like a year or two, and then go on to my next adventure. Spoiler alert: I stayed for seven years. It was one of the best periods of my professional life. And I found it to be a much deeper well than I expected it to be. But for anyone that's looking for, like, how can I structure my career in a way that will just automatically provide the sort of novelty and space to grow? I would highly recommend a consultancy like thoughtbot. I wonder if they're hiring. STEPH: Well, yes, we are hiring. That was a perfect plug that I wasn't expecting for that to come. But yes, thoughtbot is totally hiring. We'll include a link in the show notes to all the jobs. [laughs] CHRIS: Sounds fantastic. But very sincerely, that was the best choice that I could have made and was a way to flip the situation around such that I don't have to be thinking about what I want to be learning. The learning will come to me. But even within that, I still tried to be intentional from time to time. And I would say, again, I don't have a holistic theory of how to improve. I just have some stuff that's kind of worked out well. One thing is focusing on fundamentals wherever I can, or a different way to put it is giving myself permission to spend a little bit more time whenever my work brushes up against what I would consider fundamentals. So things that are in that space are like SQL. Every time I'm working on something, I'm like, ah, I could use like a CROSS JOIN here, but I don't know what that is. Maybe I'll spend an extra 30 minutes Googling around and trying to figure out what a CROSS JOIN is. Is that a thing? Is a CROSS JOIN a real thing? I may be making it up. [laughs] A window function, I know that those are real. Maybe I'll learn what a window function is. I think a CROSS JOIN is a real thing. A LEFT OUTER JOIN that's a cool thing. And so, each time I've had that, SQL has been something that expanding my knowledge; I've continually felt like that was a good investment. Or fundamentals of HTTP, that's another one that really has served me well. With Ruby being the primary language that I program in, deeply understanding the language and the fundamentals and the semantics of it that's another place that has been a good investment. But by contrast, I would say I probably haven't gone as deep on the frameworks that I work with. So Rails is maybe a little bit different just because, like many people, I came to Ruby through Rails, and I've learned a lot of Rails. But like in JavaScript, I've worked with many different JavaScript frameworks. And I have been a little more intentional with how much time I invest into furthering my skills in them because I've seen them change and evolve enough times. And if anything, I'm trying to look for ones that are like, what if it's less about the framework and more about JavaScript and web fundamentals underneath? Thus, I've found myself in Svelte land. But I think it's that choice of trying to anchor to fundamentals wherever possible. And then I would say the other thing that's been really beneficial for me is what can I do that's wildly outside the stuff that I already know? And so probably the most pointed example I have of this is learning Elm. So I previously spent most of my career working in Ruby and JavaScript, so primarily object-oriented languages without a strong type system. And then, I was able to go over and experience this whole different paradigm way of working, way of structuring programs, feedback loop. There was so much about it that was really, really interesting. And even though I don't get to work in Elm, frankly, as much as I would want at this point or really at all, it informs everything that I do moving forward. And I think that falls out of the fact that it was so different than what I was doing. So if I were to do that again, probably the next type of language I would learn is Lisp because those are like, well, that's a whole other category of thing that I've heard about. People say some fun stuff about them, but I don't really know. So it's that fundamentals and weird stuff is how I would describe it. And by weird, I mean outside of the core base of knowledge that I have. STEPH: I love that categorization, and I'll stick with it, fundamentals and weird stuff, to stretch and grow and find some other areas. I also really like your framing, the reactive versus proactive. I think that's a really nice way to put it because so much of your career is you are just learning what your company needs you to learn, or you're learning what you need to keep progressing and to feel more competent with the types of features or the work that you're handling. And I think that's why Jen Dary's blog post resonates with me so much because it's probably...up until now, a lot of someone's career, maybe not Joël's particularly, but I know probably for my career, a lot of it has been reactive in terms of what are the things that I need to learn? And so then once you reach that point of like, okay, I feel competent and reasonably good at all the things that I needed to know, where do I want to go next? And rather than focus on necessarily the plans that are laid out in front of me, I can then go wide and think about what are some of the bigger things that I want to tackle? What are the things that are meaningful to me? Because then I can now push forward to this bigger goal versus achieving a particular salary band or title or things like that. But I can focus on something else that I really want to contribute to. And there do seem to be two common paths. So once you reach that level, either you typically go into management, or you become that more like principal and then onward and upward, whatever is after principal. I don't even know what's after that, [laughs] but the titles that come after principal. So there's management, and then I've seen the other very strong contributors, so Aaron Patterson comes to mind. And I feel like those people then typically will migrate to places where they get to contribute to a language or to a framework. And I think it comes down to the idea of impact because both of those provide a greater impact. So if you go into management, you can influence and affect a team of individuals, and you can increase the value created by that team. Then you've likely exceeded the value that you would have created as your own individual contributor. Or, if you contribute to a language or a framework, then your technical decisions impact a larger community. So I think that would be another good thing to reflect on is what type of impact am I looking for? What type of communities do I want to have a positive impact on? And that may spur some inspiration around where you want to go next, the things that you want to focus on. CHRIS: Yeah, I think one of the things we're picking up in that that Joël mentioned in his question is the idea of there is the individual contributor path. But then there's also the management path, which is the typical sort of that's the progression. And I think, for one, naming that the individual contributor path and the idea of going to principal dev and those sorts of outcomes is a fantastic path in and of itself. I think often it's like, well, you know, you go along for a certain amount of time, and then you become a manager. It's like, those are actually distinctly different things. And people have different levels of interest and aptitude in them, and I think recognizing that is critically important. And so, not expecting that management just comes after individual contributor is an important thing. The other thing I'll say is Charity Majors, who we had on the podcast a bit back, has a wonderful blog post about the pendulum swing called The Engineer/Manager Pendulum. And so in it, she talks about folks that have taken an exploration over into manager land and then come back to the individual contributor path or vice versa sort of being able to move between them, treating them as two potentially parallel career tracks but ones that we can move between. And her assertion is that often folks that are particularly strong have spent some time in both camps because then you gain this empathy, this understanding of what's the whole picture? How are we doing all of this? How do we think about communication, et cetera? So, again, to name it, like, I think it's totally fine to stay on one of those tracks to really know which of those tracks speaks to you or to even move between them a little bit and to explore it and to find out what's true. So we'll include a link to that in the show notes. And we'll also include a link to the previous episode a while back when we had Charity on. But yeah, those I think are some critical thoughts as well because those are different areas that we can grow as developers and expand on our impact within the team. And so, we want to make sure we have those options on the table as well. STEPH: Absolutely. I love where teams will support individuals to feel comfortable shifting between experiences like that because it does make you a more well-rounded contributor to that product team, not just as an engineer, but then you will also understand what everybody else is working on and be able to have more meaningful conversations with them about the company goals and then the type of work that's being done. So yeah, I love it. If you're in a place that you can maybe fail a little bit, hopefully not in a too painful way, but you can take a risk and say, "Hey, I want to try something and see if I like it," then I think that's wonderful. And take the risk and see how it goes. And just know that you have an exit strategy should you decide that you don't like that work or that type of work isn't for you. But at least now you know a little bit more about yourself. Overall, I want to respond directly to something that Joël highlighted around how do you know what are high-value areas for you to improve? And I think there are two definitions there because you can either let the people around you and your team define that high value for you, and maybe that really resonates with you, and it's something that you enjoy. And so you can go to your manager and say, "Hey, what are some high-value areas where I can make an impact for the team?" Or it could be very personal. And what are the high-value areas for you? Maybe there's a particular industry that you want to work on. Maybe you want to hit the public speaking circuit. And so you define more intrinsically what are those high-value areas for you? And I think that's a good place to start collecting feedback and start looking at what's high value for you personally and then what's high value to the company and see if there's any overlap there. With that, I think we've covered a good variety of things to explore and then highlighted some of the different ways that you and I have also considered this question. I think it's a fabulous question. Also, I think it's one, even if you're not at that senior level, to ask this question. Like, go ahead and start asking it early and often and revisit your answers and see how they change. I think that would be a really powerful habit to establish early in your career and then could help guide you along, and then you can reflect on some of your earlier choices. So, Joël, thank you so much for that question. STEPH: On that note, shall we wrap up? CHRIS: Let's wrap up. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Life is like making space to birth the dreams of God into your life and not just on your own. One of the most pleasant and satisfying aspects of life is pursuing God's dream. Though it is not as simple as we imagine, the trip into God's kingdom is fascinating. In this episode, Laurie Anne shares her path in life of following God's dream and letting go of her own dream with her husband. She also digs into how she handles her family, listening to the voice of the people and the voice of God, and doing His will as well. This episode is a must-listen since it has the potential to change your life. Tune in and enjoy!   Bio: Laurie Anne Kendrick is one of the most impactful people that had the opportunity of learning from going through ministry school. She was born and raised in the deep South in Birmingham Alabama. And she has been happily married to her childhood sweetheart and the love of her life Rainer ever since 2005, and together they have six beautiful world-changing children. Laurie spent years in the interior design industry before co-founding an inner healing ministry called the Freedom House movement. She and her husband traveled to speak and minister equipping others to move and power and in freedom. Laurie completed two years of Bethel supernatural school of ministry. She has a passion and a calling to raise up wholehearted leaders and minister in an outpouring of the Father's love and joy. Her desire is to see all of God's children walk in total freedom and be brought into wholeness through supernatural healing of body, soul, and spirit.  Key Takeaway: How to work on the invitation of God for His ministry Realizing that you don't have to keep changing hats Doing good in the season of your life Believing both the voice of God and the voice of others How to build from a place of a healthy family? People Mentioned: Lisa Bevere      Links: https://www.instagram.com/laurieannkendrick/ https://www.instagram.com/freedomhousemovement/?hl=en https://freedomhousemovement.com/about-us https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/freedom-house-movement-podcast-rainer-jnwxoXSi3Iu/  https://www.wearemeantformore.com/live WeAreMeantForMore.com/moment  _______________________________________   If you want to share your story on the "Meant For More Podcast," text the word "MOMENT" to 833-231-8098 to submit your story and have Charity read it on the podcast and give you a shoutout! To join the Meant For More Community, text the word “COMMUNITY” to 833-231-8098 to learn more…   Text Charity the word "DEVO" to 833-231-8098 for 5 FREE texted daily devotionals with her new devotional card deck.   Grab Charity's DevoDeck by going to DevoDeck.com Be sure to visit my website at CharityMajors.com And come hang out with me on social media -  @CharityMajors on Instagram and Charity Majors on Facebook.   https://www.instagram.com/charitymajors/ https://www.facebook.com/CharityMajorsFanPage/   Join my FREE FB Group: http://www.charitymajors.com/meantformoretribe   I look forward to connecting with you!   xoxo - Charity   Terms & Conditions   -----------------------------------------------------   ***If you are feeling STRESSED and are struggling with anxiety, please download Charity's FREE "Reduce Stress Guided Meditation" - http://charitymajors.com/reducestress   ***If you desire to place your identity on a firm foundation, grab Charity's "DevoDeck" - a deck of devotional cards, rooted in the identity of who and whose you are.  Go to http://devodeck.com/    Grab your copy of my book (and #1 New Release), "Meant For More; Igniting Your Purpose In a World That Tries to Dim Your Light... go to http://book.wearemeantformore.com/ today!  ==============================

Episodes mentioned: Episode #108: Mulling over Multi-cloud with Corey Quinn Episode #123: APIs and the Evolution of Serverless with Dorian Smiley Episode #124: Self-Provisioning Runtimes with Shawn "swyx" Wang Episode #127: Supporting Women in Tech with Kristi Perreault Episode #125: Configuration over Code with Eric Johnson Episode #118: Deploying on Fridays with Charity Majors

Fear and doubt are one the biggest limiting belief that blocks ourselves from reaching our full potentials.  In this episode, Emily Louis shares about her journey on seeking truth and finding God's heart. Emily also dives deep into what it looks like to be a recovering achiever, and shares her experience on how to work ‘from love' instead of ‘for love'. If you are getting ready for work, having fun with friends, taking some café, or whatever you do, just enjoy it. Be with us with this inspiring episode and feel free to tune in, because I believe you will love it too. Bio:  Emily Louis has a podcast named Abundant Grace podcast and a co-hosts with another podcast named Seeking Truth and Finding God's Heart. She is a passionate about helping Christians overcome the view of God that leave them believing that He is harsh or distance. Her mission is to help equip and encourage those who have worked hard to gain God's acceptance in the past, and to heal their relationship with Him and themselves so that they can live out their faith with confidence.    Key Takeaway: How to have a loving and peaceful relationship with God without doub and fear Learning to surrender and trust God to be in control with your life The false fear perception of surrendering to God in order to change one's life What it looks like to transition from ‘Striving' to ‘Thriving' relationship with God   Links: https://emilyklouis.com/ https://www.instagram.com/emily.abundantgrace/ https://linktr.ee/Emily.Louis https://www.buzzsprout.com/1203743 https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/abundant-grace-emily-louis-e_3y5ZHSjut/ https://www.facebook.com/Emily-Louis-105392084970783   https://www.wearemeantformore.com/live WeAreMeantForMore.com/moment  _______________________________________   If you want to share your story on the "Meant For More Podcast," text the word "MOMENT" to 833-231-8098 to submit your story and have Charity read it on the podcast and give you a shoutout! To join the Meant For More Community, text the word “COMMUNITY” to 833-231-8098 to learn more…   Text Charity the word "DEVO" to 833-231-8098 for 5 FREE texted daily devotionals with her new devotional card deck.   Grab Charity's DevoDeck by going to DevoDeck.com Be sure to visit my website at CharityMajors.com And come hang out with me on social media -  @CharityMajors on Instagram and Charity Majors on Facebook.   https://www.instagram.com/charitymajors/ https://www.facebook.com/CharityMajorsFanPage/   Join my FREE FB Group: http://www.charitymajors.com/meantformoretribe   I look forward to connecting with you!   xoxo - Charity   Terms & Conditions   -----------------------------------------------------   ***If you are feeling STRESSED and are struggling with anxiety, please download Charity's FREE "Reduce Stress Guided Meditation" - http://charitymajors.com/reducestress   ***If you desire to place your identity on a firm foundation, grab Charity's "DevoDeck" - a deck of devotional cards, rooted in the identity of who and whose you are.  Go to http://devodeck.com/    Grab your copy of my book (and #1 New Release), "Meant For More; Igniting Your Purpose In a World That Tries to Dim Your Light... go to http://book.wearemeantformore.com/ today!  ==============================  

Are you easily jealous of others' achievements?  It is inevitable for us to feel envious when others gain their momentum of winning.  Even if we don't mean it, when we see someone getting better and winning in life, our hearts turn bitter with uncontrollable jealousy. Jealousy can steal our joy and drive us into sin, such as doing something just to pull someone down or delivering a poor testimony about them to others. This is something that we should NOT do as believers. This episode will help you in resolving your situation right now so that you can overcome your jealousy and enjoy your life with others' winning seasons. If you catch yourself falling into jealousy, if you catch yourself falling into comparison because someone is in there winning season, then this episode is for you. Just tune in, take a deep breath and enjoy.   Key Takeaways: What is the testimony of Jesus?  How can you reframe your jealousy?    Why do I stop getting jealous of people in their winning season?  What do you need to do to encourage others instead of getting jealous? Links:   https://www.wearemeantformore.com/live   WeAreMeantForMore.com/moment  _______________________________________   If you want to share your story on the "Meant For More Podcast," text the word "MOMENT" to 833-231-8098 to submit your story and have Charity read it on the podcast and give you a shoutout! To join the Meant For More Community, text the word “COMMUNITY” to 833-231-8098 to learn more…   Text Charity the word "DEVO" to 833-231-8098 for 5 FREE texted daily devotionals with her new devotional card deck.   Grab Charity's DevoDeck by going to DevoDeck.com Be sure to visit my website at CharityMajors.com And come hang out with me on social media -  @CharityMajors on Instagram and Charity Majors on Facebook.  https://www.instagram.com/charitymajors/ https://www.facebook.com/CharityMajorsFanPage/ Join my FREE FB Group: http://www.charitymajors.com/meantformoretribe I look forward to connecting with you! xoxo - Charity   Terms & Conditions   -----------------------------------------------------   ***If you are feeling STRESSED and are struggling with anxiety, please download Charity's FREE "Reduce Stress Guided Meditation" - http://charitymajors.com/reducestress   ***If you desire to place your identity on a firm foundation, grab Charity's "DevoDeck" - a deck of devotional cards, rooted in the identity of who and whose you are.  Go to http://devodeck.com/    Grab your copy of my book (and #1 New Release), "Meant For More; Igniting Your Purpose In a World That Tries to Dim Your Light... go to http://book.wearemeantformore.com/ today!  ==============================

You might have asked yourself, “how can I become a better woman?”  Women used to have their own interpretation of being positive toward God. We all want to be better people who despise weaknesses, right? Nobody enjoys being vulnerable. God, on the other hand, uses it to reveal His power in us. We try to convince ourselves that we are strong, but God always tells us to trust Him completely. God desires to work in your life; all He requires is that you let Him in.  Because, above all, He can build better things through the work of the Holy Spirit, which can be your aid in becoming connected to Him and to serve Him. In this episode, Hayley Braun will be with us as she brings an interesting topic that can lead us more to the presence of God. Just feel the presence of God and let your heart be open to this new touching story. God is inviting you to renew your relationship with Him. What are you waiting for? Tune in and enjoy!   Bio: Haley Braun is an overseer of the Bethel Supernatural School of Ministry Online in Redding, California, with Bethel Church. She has been one of Charity's mentors over the last few years. She walks with such integrity and grace and strength. And she really does find this beautiful balance of what to own the way that God made her in her feistiness.    Key Takeaway: Acknowledging God in All Your Ways How often do women deal with the words “too”? Why does God call you as God calls himself a helper? What will happen if you don't trust in God? What is our weakness according to the Bible? How can you handle difficult situations with God?  Allowing God to Be Your Life's Shield Saying YES: Permitting the Holy Spirit to Come and Fill You   People Mentioned: Michael kuleana   Links: https://www.bethel.com/leadership/hayley-braun/ https://www.instagram.com/hayley_braun_/   https://www.wearemeantformore.com/live WeAreMeantForMore.com/moment  _______________________________________   If you want to share your story on the "Meant For More Podcast," text the word "MOMENT" to 833-231-8098 to submit your story and have Charity read it on the podcast and give you a shoutout! To join the Meant For More Community, text the word “COMMUNITY” to 833-231-8098 to learn more…   Text Charity the word "DEVO" to 833-231-8098 for 5 FREE texted daily devotionals with her new devotional card deck.   Grab Charity's DevoDeck by going to DevoDeck.com Be sure to visit my website at CharityMajors.com And come hang out with me on social media -  @CharityMajors on Instagram and Charity Majors on Facebook.   https://www.instagram.com/charitymajors/ https://www.facebook.com/CharityMajorsFanPage/   Join my FREE FB Group: http://www.charitymajors.com/meantformoretribe   I look forward to connecting with you!   xoxo - Charity   Terms & Conditions   -----------------------------------------------------   ***If you are feeling STRESSED and are struggling with anxiety, please download Charity's FREE "Reduce Stress Guided Meditation" - http://charitymajors.com/reducestress   ***If you desire to place your identity on a firm foundation, grab Charity's "DevoDeck" - a deck of devotional cards, rooted in the identity of who and whose you are.  Go to http://devodeck.com/    Grab your copy of my book (and #1 New Release), "Meant For More; Igniting Your Purpose In a World That Tries to Dim Your Light... go to http://book.wearemeantformore.com/ today!  ==============================  

It's difficult to leave a job where you're unhappy, especially if you need the money and your family wants you to stay. But even if you are uncertain of what could happen next or if you face a difficult situation leaving your job behind, remember that God's purpose for your life will always prevail. Whatever season you are in right now, no matter how lost you feel, you will always discover what God has planned for you and who He has called you to be. There is a way to turn to God because a better future awaits you. Even though it is difficult, it is undeniably worthwhile. This episode will help you let go of whatever is holding you back and guide you in moving forward until you reach what God has called you to be for yourself and for others. Whether you are at home grabbing a cup of joe, or maybe you're at the gym or simply heading to work, listen to this episode because you will surely love this one!  Bio: Rachel Luna is a certified master coach, international speaker, and one of Forbes' Top 11 Inspiring Female Entrepreneurs. She is a chief confidence creator. She helps remarkable individuals just like you get clear, confident, and take consistent action so that you can do the big things that you were born to do. She helped thousands of people around the world through her book, her weekly emails, speaking tours, workshops, and digital courses.   Key Takeaway: Having a string of moments where you keep finding yourself in unfavorable situations Realizing that what you are doing now is not who God has called you to be  How to handle an uncomfortable situation Activating Your Faith in God How can you make your dream a reality? People Mentioned:  Jamie Kern Lima – American entrepreneur, investor and media personality. She is recognized as the co-founder of IT Cosmetics and the first female chief executive officer of a L'Oréal brand in the company's history.   Links: Permission to Offend Podcast - Permission to Offend with Rachel Luna on Apple Podcasts Rachel Luna #GirlConfident (@girlconfident) • Instagram photos and videos Faith Activated https://www.wearemeantformore.com/live WeAreMeantForMore.com/moment  _______________________________________   If you want to share your story on the "Meant For More Podcast," text the word "MOMENT" to 833-231-8098 to submit your story and have Charity read it on the podcast and give you a shoutout! To join the Meant For More Community, text the word “COMMUNITY” to 833-231-8098 to learn more…   Text Charity the word "DEVO" to 833-231-8098 for 5 FREE texted daily devotionals with her new devotional card deck.   Grab Charity's DevoDeck by going to DevoDeck.com Be sure to visit my website at CharityMajors.com And come hang out with me on social media -  @CharityMajors on Instagram and Charity Majors on Facebook.   https://www.instagram.com/charitymajors/ https://www.facebook.com/CharityMajorsFanPage/   Join my FREE FB Group: http://www.charitymajors.com/meantformoretribe   I look forward to connecting with you!   xoxo - Charity   Terms & Conditions   -----------------------------------------------------   ***If you are feeling STRESSED and are struggling with anxiety, please download Charity's FREE "Reduce Stress Guided Meditation" - http://charitymajors.com/reducestress   ***If you desire to place your identity on a firm foundation, grab Charity's "DevoDeck" - a deck of devotional cards, rooted in the identity of who and whose you are.  Go to http://devodeck.com/    Grab your copy of my book (and #1 New Release), "Meant For More; Igniting Your Purpose In a World That Tries to Dim Your Light... go to http://book.wearemeantformore.com/ today!  ==============================

Some people are afraid to live a risky life, especially if they are unsure of what will happen next. They are used to living an easy life rather than a risky one. But if we go beyond our limitations, this can be the perfect adventure that you will ever have, especially with the family.  Sometimes, we ask ourselves why we are encountering such a terrible situation that can destroy our whole life. We don't understand the things that are happening and. they can lead us into trauma, fear, and brokenness. But as we go through the healing process, we will understand the reason why we encounter that situation, and it will lead us to help other people who are suffering in the same situation. In this episode, we will be motivated by the stories of Tanya Hackney and Tasha Wilson. These stories will help you realize that there is a reason for every situation. So be inspired because this episode is for you. Don't waste your time, just relax and tune it on. Key Takeaway: Tanya Hackney Meant for More moment with Tanya Hackney Taking a risk on an adventure instead of choosing a safe and predictable life Facing my fears and living a life that I would never regret while traveling Tasha Wilson Meant for More moment with Tasha Wilson Having trauma and pain from some bad incidents in life Having doubts about one's worth and existence as a result of being broken and damaged Being tired of every feeling Deciding to release all the traumas in life Using those bad experiences to help other people Book Mentioned: Leaving the Safe Harbor   Links:  Tanya Hackney https://www.instagram.com/taketwosailing/ Tasha Wilson https://www.instagram.com/lifewithtashaw_/ Send your meant for more story: to 833-231-8098 https://www.wearemeantformore.com/live   WeAreMeantForMore.com/moment  _______________________________________   If you want to share your story on the "Meant For More Podcast," text the word "MOMENT" to 833-231-8098 to submit your story and have Charity read it on the podcast and give you a shoutout! To join the Meant For More Community, text the word “COMMUNITY” to 833-231-8098 to learn more…   Text Charity the word "DEVO" to 833-231-8098 for 5 FREE texted daily devotionals with her new devotional card deck.   Grab Charity's DevoDeck by going to DevoDeck.com Be sure to visit my website at CharityMajors.com And come hang out with me on social media -  @CharityMajors on Instagram and Charity Majors on Facebook.  https://www.instagram.com/charitymajors/ https://www.facebook.com/CharityMajorsFanPage/ Join my FREE FB Group: http://www.charitymajors.com/meantformoretribe I look forward to connecting with you! xoxo - Charity   Terms & Conditions   -----------------------------------------------------   ***If you are feeling STRESSED and are struggling with anxiety, please download Charity's FREE "Reduce Stress Guided Meditation" - http://charitymajors.com/reducestress   ***If you desire to place your identity on a firm foundation, grab Charity's "DevoDeck" - a deck of devotional cards, rooted in the identity of who and whose you are.  Go to http://devodeck.com/    Grab your copy of my book (and #1 New Release), "Meant For More; Igniting Your Purpose In a World That Tries to Dim Your Light... go to http://book.wearemeantformore.com/ today!  ==============================

Charity is an author, inspirational speaker, a soulful mindset coach and savvy business strategist, that has coached over 1000 women, all around the world to step into their greatest potential, grow their confidence, build their coaching business and make a Major I.M.P.A.C.T. Her expertise in mindset, confidence and becoming a heart-centered leader that turns their passion into profit is her superpower. She is an award-winning entrepreneur, down-to-earth (yet powerful) speaker, a podcaster (find her on iTunes), and the author of the #1 New Release and #2 Best Seller, "Meant For More; Igniting Your Purpose in a World That Tries to Dim Your Light." We discuss the following and more! Three keys to know that you are meant for more. How to align with your God-given purpose in business. Identifying your spiritual gifts and using them in your business. Tips around unshakable confidence and how to implement this into business. 7-steps to stand out and make a Major I.M.P.A.C.T. The power of live events. Connect with Charity! Charity Majors | Unlock Your Life's Purpose (16) Charity Majors | Facebook (60) Charity Majors | LinkedIn Author