Observability & Testing in Production 🔭 — with Charity Majors
May 10, 2024
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CTO at Honeycomb, Charity Majors, discusses observability, testing in production, continuous delivery, and developer experience. Topics include transitioning from monitoring to observing, optimal infra cost allocation, embracing mistakes in distributed systems, evolution of engineering culture, and value of junior engineers in team dynamics.
Observability is crucial for understanding code behavior and predicting issues.
Testing in production is essential for deploying code changes swiftly and successfully.
Junior engineers bring fresh perspectives and energy to engineering teams, fostering innovation and team vitality.
Deep dives
Observability and Testing in Production
Observability is discussed as a property of complex systems, essential for understanding code behavior. Charity Majors mentions the shift from monitoring to observability, advocating for understanding code runtime to foresee issues, improving developer experience. The conversation covers the importance of testing in production, highlighting how speed and predictability are key in deploying code changes and ensuring successful updates.
Changing Role of Engineering and Leadership
The evolving role of engineers is explored, emphasizing the transition towards engineers also understanding business impact and user needs. The discussion underscores the importance of engineers caring about the product and users, with AI advancements augmenting rather than replacing the need for deep code understanding. Charity Majors stresses the value of engineering leadership in showcasing possibilities and fostering a culture of curiosity and innovation.
Challenges Faced by Engineering Teams
The challenges faced by engineering teams, such as fear of unexpected issues and the need to prevent failures, are addressed. Charity Majors highlights the balance required between preventing failures and facilitating swift recovery, emphasizing the importance of maintaining stability while embracing mistakes and speeding up recovery processes.
Impact of Agile Engineering Practices
Charity Majors discusses the significance of agile engineering practices, such as continuous delivery and testing in production, in fostering rapid code deployment and effective debugging processes. The conversation emphasizes the importance of aligning code deployment with understanding code behaviors in real environments to enhance productivity and maintain resilience.
Value of Junior Engineers and Team Dynamics
The value of junior engineers in fostering team dynamics and maintaining a healthy work environment is highlighted. Charity Majors stresses the importance of incorporating junior engineers for fresh perspectives, energy, and a sense of fun in engineering teams. The importance of mentorship, challenges, and growth opportunities for junior engineers is emphasized to drive innovation and maintain team vitality.
Today's guest is Charity Majors, CTO at Honeycomb and one of my
absolute favorite writers. I believe I have recommended more articles
from her blog than any other author on the newsletter.
Today we talked about observability, testing in production, continuous delivery, developer experience and much more.
Here is what we talked about:
(00:49) Introduction
(01:57) What is observability
(07:00) Observability in microservices
(12:51) From monitoring to observing
(16:20) Start observing now
(19:36) How to use observability
(26:11) Observability costs
(31:23) Testing in production
(34:09) Continuous delivery
(38:24) The greatest productivity offenders
(43:04) Caring about the business
(46:54) Generative tools add complexity
(49:15) Junior engineers leverage
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