O11ycast Ep. #88, Metrics Are Good, Actually with Charity Majors
10 snips
Jan 14, 2026 
In this engaging discussion, Charity Majors, Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, explores the evolving landscape of observability in software development. She delves into how AI is transforming cloud expectations and emphasizes the importance of structured events and logs for meaningful insights. Charity argues for a shift from traditional metrics to continuous learning cycles, advocating for rapid deployments to enhance organizational learning. With her insights into the Dev–Prod feedback loop, she highlights how observability is a crucial sense-making practice in tech.
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Episode notes
AI Compresses Technology Timelines
- AI has compressed timelines: technologies that were once experimental become mainstream far faster now.
- Charity says AI demands much faster feedback loops and changes what "fast" means in engineering.
Book Section Rewritten After Feedback
- Charity scrapped a whole book section after reader feedback showed she had the wrong emphasis.
- She rewrote chapters to address technical decision-makers up the hierarchy instead.
When Metrics Are The Right Tool
- Charity distinguishes small-m "metrics" (numbers) from metric data as time-series with tags.
- She argues metrics are the right tool for infrastructure and ops health monitoring.
