Charity Majors
Observability & operations
CTO of Honeycomb. Observability, platform engineering, and what AI does to operations.
Recent activity
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Have you heard? Clickhouse is winning the observability wars!
Years ago I predicted that columnar storage would remake observability. What I didn't see coming: vendors would build it, nerf it, and sell a worse version back to you as "Datadog, but cheaper"
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In defense of AI mandates
When you need to execute a coordinated change on a tight timeline, a mandate is the best and most honest way to fund it.
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Is it ethical to use AI?
On externalities and engagement, the problem with purity politics, and why we need to make AI boring again
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AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less
If you lived through the shift from handcrafted server pets to immutable infrastructure, you should sense something oddly familiar about what's happening now.
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AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy
Both sides are grappling with a real existential threat, and both sides feel like they are screaming into the void. Here's how to close the gap and get everyone pulling in the same direction.
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Your Data Is Made Powerful By Context (so stop destroying it already)
In logs as in life, the relationships are the most important part. AI doesn't fix this. It makes it worse.
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My (hypothetical) SRECon26 keynote
One year ago, Fred Hebert and I delivered the closing keynote at SRECon25. Looking back on it now, I can hardly connect with how I felt then. Here's what I'd say one year later.
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First I wrote the wrong book, then I wrote the right book
I'm not sure whether to say "thank you" or "HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME", but this one goes out to all the people who sent me advice on buying software last fall.
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Martin Fowler told me the second edition should be shorter (it's twice as long)
90% new material, a clearer mission, and a rogues gallery of contributors. The second edition of Observability Engineering is almost done.
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Bring Back Ops Pride
"Operations" is not a dirty word, a synonym for toil, or a title for people who can't write code. May those who shit on ops get the operational outcomes they deserve.
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