Founders Table Moving Towards Observability 2.0 with Charity Majors
Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, an observability platform that helps teams solve problems faster within their distributed services. Before co-founding Honeycomb, Charity made significant contributions at companies like Linden Labs (creators of Second Life), Parse, and Meta. She has co-authored books including "Database Reliability Engineering" and "Observability Engineering" and is a frequent speaker at tech conferences. Charity is active on social media and is known for her advocacy of "observability 2.0", "testing in production", and thoughts on hiring and and career advancement.
In today's episode, we talk about:
* Charity's preference single malt scotch
* the honeycomb origin story and Charity's initial reluctance to start a company despite investor interest
* Observability 2.0: what is it, why now, and why it matters
* the tragedy of high cardinality metric pricing
* advice on overcoming the fear of public speaking and the career advantages of building a public profile.
* focusing on communication skills and cultural fit when hiring
* creating truly diverse teams that go beyond race or gender to build a collaborative and resilient culture
* thoughts on organizational hierarchy and how that has changed over time
* why it's important to have the business come first
Where to find Charity:
* Website
Closing Questions
* advice to current founders: life isn't fair - the path to success is different for everyone. health should comes first and you need to prioritize personal well-being for long term success.
* when you think of success, who or what comes to mind: instead of thinking of people as higher or lower, everyone is a peer. in the context of business, success wil come from proving that strong morals and good culture can coexist with business success
Ask or Offer
* ask: for anyone that doesn't use Honeycomb and would be open to discuss their reasons, please reach out (via LinkedIn)
* offer: 50% discount for 3 months when using honeycomb. use the code HNYCAST50 to redeem
Referenced
* The Cost Crisis in Observability Tooling
* Transforming to an Engineering Culture of Curiosity With a Modern Observability 2.0 Solution
* Observations on the Enterprise of Hiring
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