Liz Fong-Jones

Liz Fong-Jones, a seasoned Developer Advocate at Honeycomb, shares her insights into modern telemetry solutions and their pivotal role in enhancing system reliability. She discusses strategies for educating leadership on effective telemetry practices and the cultural shift towards embracing failure as a learning opportunity. The conversation also touches on overcoming resistance to change in tech environments, boosting developer confidence during deployments, and the importance of meaningful insights from observability tools, ultimately advocating for a balanced approach to technology adoption.

Exploring the evolution of observability products, application telemetry collection, and microservices design patterns. Discussing the challenges and growth of observability tools, including the role of distributed tracing and market dynamics between hyperscalers and ISVs. Delving into the shift towards empowering developers, adoption of open telemetry, and the complexities in choosing between Data Dog and OpenTelemetry. Highlighting the benefits of open telemetry in enhancing observability and the impact on software developers.

In this discussion, Liz Fong-Jones, Field CTO at Honeycomb with expertise in observability and SRE, and Lesley Cordero, Staff Software Engineer at The New York Times, dive into the intricacies of platform engineering. They explore the evolution from DevOps roots, emphasizing the need for psychological safety and effective documentation. Topics include the balance between centralized platform teams and developer autonomy, the relevance of open source, and the pitfalls of conflating Kubernetes with developer platforms. Their insights are vital for fostering a healthy developer experience.

Liz Fong-Jones, a former Google SRE and current Field CTO at honeycomb.io, dives into the fascinating world of observability. She shares insights on how observability has evolved from traditional monitoring, likening it to medical diagnostics. Liz emphasizes its critical role in enhancing user satisfaction through Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and discusses the balance between human insight and machine learning in system analysis. Additionally, she highlights the transformation of Site Reliability Engineering, advocating for collaboration and hands-on experience in modern software development.

Field CTO Liz Fong-Jones and Developer Advocate Marit van Dijk discuss efficient development collaboration and proven SRE practices. Topics include communication challenges, software dependencies, evolving SRE roles, and building internal platforms. They highlight the importance of teamwork, streamlined communication, and code quality for successful development outcomes.