Honeycomb's Lightning Speed Continues to Wow Users
Honeycomb's speed is one of those things we just get used to and forget about, but it's fun to watch people discover it all over again. ☺️
Intercom Reveals Metrics Behind Its 2x Growth Promise
Intercom's followup to their famous "2x" commitment in public. The most useful part is the list of metrics they judged their own success by. Read the whole thread.
Avoid Slow, Per-Seat SaaS: Build Less, Use Better
Be bearish slow SaaS, and shitty SaaS, and anyone who charges per-seat. (sus) I think the tools with the most to fear are the ones everybody hates the most. Do I want to have to build and maintain all the apps I...
Agents Need User Interaction History, Not Just Code
Banger of a piece, from start to finish. 🔥 "We have handed agents the codebase, the tests, the docs, the specs, the commit history." "We haven't handed them the one artifact that actually survived — the record of what users have been...
Observability Mirrors Product Value, Not a Cost Center
I have a chapter in the 2nd ed that argues that o11y is not a cost center, it inherits the properties of the software it observes. * infra is a cost center? so is infra o11y * product is an investment? so...
AI SRE Agents Bypass Aggregated Telemetry, Fetch Raw Data
TIL that when you turn a bunch of AI-SRE agents loose on your system, with access to three pillars style telemetry, they... turn up their noses and refuse to use it. They go back to the source and fetch the raw...
From AI Skepticism to New SRE Perspective in One Year
Less than a year ago, Fred and I gave the closing keynote at SRECon25. I can hardly connect with the way I felt back then, or the pitch I made for why skeptical SREs should engage with AI. If I was...
Observability, Control Flow, Interruption: Key to Safe Agent Orchestration
Terrific thread on agent orchestration architectures. "If an agent started making confident but wrong decisions, how many actions would execute before I could stop it?" The three magic words are "observability", "control flow ownership", and "interruption".
Senior Engineers Champion Junior Hiring, Not Execs
Terrific new paper in the ACM from @shanselman and Mark Russinovich, proposing an apprenticeship model for junior engineers. https://t.co/XnQcH3emkj I'll add one thing. At every place that I have seen start hiring junior engineers in the last few years, that charge...
Closing the Loop: Feeding Production Feedback to Developers
ah, this is THE question: how to bring the feedback on changes back TO developers? i wrote this piece very recently on developer feedback loops in production: https://t.co/4GqKa1SCBA which includes this 3 min honeycomb demo from september: https://t.co/GNPVLI37YE
AI's Easy; Scaling Software 100x Faster Is the Real Hurdle
What people seem to be struggling with the most is not the truly novel parts of building with AI, it's the table stakes. It's not the AI part that's so hard (turns out systems have never been wholly deterministic 😉), it's...
Martin Fowler’s Timely Advice & Guest Lineup Revealed
new post up: in which @martinfowler gives me the best advice ever at the worst possible time, plus... a rundown of the special guests to expect in the second edition of "Observability Engineering"! https://t.co/ZcaP1rzYib