Gerhard talks with Charity Majors, ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io about high-performing teams, why “15 minutes or bust,” and how we should start using Honeycomb in our own monolithic Phoenix app that runs changelog.com. There is just one step, and it’s actually really simple!

They also talk about how Honeycomb uses Honeycomb to learn about Honeycomb, which is one of Gerhard’s favorite questions. As for key take-aways, deploying straight into production is really important, but not as important as optimising for humans - which are not replaceable cogs, that learn and share their learnings continuously. That is the secret to making things easy and happy for everyone.

I love the way Charity Majors, CEO of Honeycomb.io, opens up this post…

What should one pay for observability?

How much observability is enough? How much is too much, or is there such a thing?

Is it better to pay for one product that claims (dubiously) to do everything, or twenty products that are each optimized to do a different part of the problem super well?

It’s almost enough to make a busy engineer say “Screw it, I’m spinning up Nagios”.

(Hey, I said almost.)

Charity Majors joined the show to talk about debugging complex systems, using go to save one’s sanity, hiring smart people who can learn, and collectively working to make “on-call” life not miserable.