Honeycomb cofounder and CTO, and coauthor of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering. She writes about understanding production systems through rich telemetry and short feedback loops.[3][2]
Start with Scary Things Happen in Production. Context Helps You Find Them. →
Links
Official author biography Personal writing
X · mipsytipsy Cofounder and CTO · Honeycomb
Career
Majors worked on distributed systems at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab before Honeycomb. Her engineering writing connects that operational experience with tools that let developers ask detailed questions about requests, users and deployments. Her books develop the same concern with understanding running systems.[3]
Ideas
Retain context so a surprising pattern can be investigated
Her context essay argues for wide structured events: a request carries attributes about its build, user, environment and behavior together. Developers can then combine fields to distinguish a meaningful change from a noisy baseline. Recording intent and deployment context helps connect an observed effect with the change that might have caused it. Aggregated metrics alone can conceal the particular requests needed to explain the difference.[2]
Make production feedback part of engineering rigor
Production Is Where the Rigor Goes argues that specifications and pre-release tests need a continuing feedback loop after deployment. Instrumentation, feature flags and progressive rollout let engineers compare intended behavior with actual use. As code changes arrive faster, she argues that validation and comprehension must keep pace with the running system.[5]
Tools, writing & talks
Writing, research & talks
Start here
An authored explanation of wide events, developer intent and investigating production behavior.
Start with the context essay and imagine investigating one unexpected request. Basic experience operating a web application helps; follow how retained attributes let a developer narrow a question.
Author[2]- Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsnewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Charity Majors on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, arguing against continued skepticism about using AI in software development.
Catalog workOriginal source - Production Is Where the Rigor Goeshoneycomb.io
An essay connecting observability and deployment feedback with engineering discipline.
Author[5] - Observability Engineering, second editionhoneycomb.io
Majors’s introduction to the updated book and its focus on understanding increasingly complex software systems.
Book coauthor and article author[1]