Recent content in HONKATHON on honkathon
This post is part of a short series about my experience in the VP of Engineering role at Honeycomb. The first post is Part 1: Doing the Job. Charity once said an off-hand sentence that became a mantra for my transition into the VP of Engineering role: “Directors run the company.” This was said in the context of thinking about how the various management roles around the company interact: line…
This post is part of a short series about my experience in the VP of Engineering role at Honeycomb. In February of 2020, I was promoted from Director of Engineering to Honeycomb’s first VP of Engineering. Although Charity wrote an extremely generous public announcement, I hesitated to talk about this new role for quite a while as I was figuring out the job. But since 2020, I’ve noticed how little…
I am a beneficiary of reparations. Here’s why I support reparations for Black Americans. This month, a Monmouth University poll showed that 76 percent of Americans, and 71 percent of white Americans, believe that racial and ethnic discrimination is a “big problem” in the United States. Just a few years ago, little more than half of white Americans believed that. -Nikole Hannah-Jones, ”What Is…
or, the small crisis with engineering line management In 2018, Honeycomb co-founder & CTO Charity Majors wrote a blog post titled, “An Engineer’s Bill of Rights (and Responsibilities).” The post describes how, in most software engineering organizations, power naturally accrues to managers—and also makes the case that it’s important to limit this accrual in some ways, guaranteeing certain…
Note: I started writing this before the March 16 Atlanta shootings. Like many, many Americans, I am outraged and saddened by the events in Atlanta, and the overwhelming response to those events has informed some of what is captured here. This post also attempts to collect observations about other events from 2020 and early 2021. I’ll try to make distinctions between pre- and post-Atlanta…
Upcoming CTO Summit 2021 Favorites o11ycon, Observability is for User Happiness (2018) Monitorama PDX, What Your Javascript Does When You’re Not Around (2016) More 2021 Failover Conf: Panel Discussion: The Evolution of Observability & Monitoring 2020 #PerfMatters, Observability for Web Perf CTO Summit SF 2020, Hiring is Broken 2019 performance.now(), Amsterdam, DevOpsDays Des Moines, The…
I love a good chat backchannel. I’ve gone on vacations with my backchannels. I have enamel pins, stickers, and other custom merch from backchannels. I’ve landed at least three jobs via backchannel connections. I’ve listened and strategized with backchannel members who were getting shut out, pushed out, or overlooked, and I’ve been there to celebrate as backchannel friends…
I truly want to be a big company person, but I am a generalist who gets bored easily, and the reality is that I love startups. It’s true that most things at most startups are perpetually on fire, but if you can accept that, there is a lot to like. One well-known one: at a fast-growing startup, a hard-working, talented person who has some support from company leadership* can often acquire an…
The first time I took a job at a company that didn’t really “do” job titles, I remember feeling like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I was leaving an environment where managerial power plays and career ambitions had sometimes been put before team productivity or happiness, and I felt like I had suddenly been liberated from all of the petty political angling that surrounded promotions…
Rachel Myers and I talked about Sunset Testing in our talks at O’Reilly’s Fluent Conf 2014 and Front-End Ops Conf, and a number of people asked us if we had a blog post on the topic that they could share with their coworkers. We didn’t, so here it is, somewhat belatedly. When I write some javascript to work around a browser compatibility bug or some custom ruby to show different configurations for…
I’ve been enjoying Ben Vinegar & Anton Kovalyov’s Third-Party Javascript and would recommend it to anyone who is looking to build their front-end expertise, not just to those working on third-party scripts. One thing the book doesn’t provide, but that I found myself wanting, was a short checklist to run through while evaluating vendors or scripts. So here’s my stab at that, with some of my own…
How to get started with web performance optimization in five steps At ModCloth, I was lucky enough to have dedicated time to focus on web performance optimization. I spent a full month totally focused on web perf and a few months after that with a dedicated percentage of my queue set aside for perf work. With this amount of time, my team was able to clean up thousands of lines of legacy javascript…