And we tried everything too, you know, all of the current best practices and nothing worked until we got acquired by Facebook and we started using this tool called scuba. It was professionally humiliating to me just how often the site was going down. We were doing these multi-tenant platforms when all we had to understand were metrics, aggregates, and logs. We were doing microservices before there were microservices. The experience we had was Parse was doing a lot of stuff that was before its time. Parse is this mobile backend as a service that was acquired by Google.sorry, acquired by Facebook, I wish. When Christine and I started Honeycomb, it was after this experience of Parse we had had. I think Twitter had used observability engineering for the name of its team once, but, it wasn't a thing. But when we started Honeycomb back in 2016, like, observability wasn't in the air. I know Liz has her spin on it coming from Google. Well, maybe I'll talk just briefly about the origin story for Honeycomb, which is kind of the origin story for observability. There's no longer a, "Oops, this is already out of date," you know, from the moment the ink is dry.Ĭharity Majors: Yes, for sure. Also, the code examples that we use now are 1.0. So we can almost provide a pointer to existing documentation rather than having to explain it all ourselves. Then it turns out that other people have written excellent documentation. One of the key things that I was lamenting to George always was that when we originally sat down to write about open telemetry, we were imagining that it was going to be this giant effort to explain to people how they should instrument their code. It wouldn't have taken us this long to write if observability, as we know it today, had existed in its present form three years ago. But also things have been changing along the way pretty quickly. It's been nice having the reader feedback all along, which is the main thing I have. The evolution of Observability EngineeringĬharity Majors: I hope so too. I think we've done, hopefully, a pretty good job of it when I look back at it, maybe. But then as we kept going there were parts of the book that I was then able to own and run with.Īnd so I can only hope that as folks read this book, they also can glean some of the insights that just made things click, that made the practice of observability easy to understand and follow and to understand why it is such a paradigm shift. I think it took me a couple of months to wrap my brain around it. And having the two of you to lean on in terms of the insights and just the different areas of focus that you both brought to the table, I think, one, really let me absorb that working with both of your writings internalizes it. This was a way for me to wrap my mind around the nuance and the difference. I think working with you and with Liz Fong-Jones has just been super informative for me joining Honeycomb. I guess, you know what, this is not my first O'Reilly book, but I've written many smaller-length O'Reilly books. I think the three of us have been a really good combination to. And I feel like that was when we finally got an actual rhythm to it. I would spew out a couple of pages of just, like, notes off the top of my head, and he would turn out these beautiful, nicely crafted entire chapters. He just brought so much structure to the process. But I don't feel like the train got its wheels on, and that's a bit of a metaphor until George started. Anyway, Liz came on board first, I think and drew up a whole new chapter outline and we started writing. I'd been doing the book for a little while, and I thought we were half done. Liz Fong-Jones: It was my first rodeo with a book, but it was not Charity's first rodeo with a book.Ĭharity Majors: No, no. So I'm super excited to be here to talk about this book today.Ĭharity Majors: I feel like when George joined, Liz and I were both like, "Hey, we're half done with this book." Remember that?Ĭharity Majors: Exactly. And together, we've all been cranking on this for a while and getting it done. I was super interested, so I just jumped right in. When I joined Honeycomb, the book was somewhat in its infancy. And we're really glad to have George Miranda on board as well. And I got roped into this book project a couple of years ago, which is exciting. I'm a principal developer advocate at Honeycomb. And I'm here with my co-authors, Liz Fong-Jones and George Miranda. I am Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, and co-author of the upcoming " Observability Engineering" book.
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