Charity Majors is Co-Founder and CTO of Honeycomb, which provides full-stack observability that enables engineers to deeply understand and debug production software together.
Victoria and Will talk to Charity about observability, her technical background and decision to start Honeycomb.io, thoughts about the whole ops SRE profession, and things that surprised her along her journey of building a company around observability as a concept.
Honeycomb (https://www.honeycomb.io/)
Follow Honeycomb on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/honeycombio), Twitter (https://twitter.com/honeycombio), Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCty8KGQ3oAP0MQQmLIv7k0Q), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/honeycomb.io/).
Follow Charity Majors on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/charity-majors/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy), or visit her website (https://charity.wtf/).
Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/).
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Transcript:
VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido.
WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with us today is Charity Majors, Co-Founder and CTO of Honeycomb, which provides full-stack observability that enables engineers to deeply understand and debug production software together. Charity, thank you for joining us. How are you doing?
CHARITY: Thanks for having me. I'm a little bit crunchy from a [laughs] long flight this morning. But I'm very happy to be home in San Francisco and happy to be talking to you.
VICTORIA: Wonderful. And, Charity, I looked at your profile and noticed that you're a fan of whiskey. And I thought I might ask you just to get us started here, like, what's your favorite brand?
CHARITY: Oh, goodness, that's like asking me to choose my favorite child if I had children. [laughter]. You know, I used to really be into the peaty scotches, the Islays, in particular. But lately, I've been more of a bourbon kick. Of course, everybody loves Pappy Van Winkle, George T. Stagg; impossible to find now, but it's so, so good. You know, if it's high-proof and single barrel, I will probably drink it.
VICTORIA: That sounds great. Yeah, I tend to have the same approach. And, like, people ask me if I like it, and I like all of them. [laughter] I don't [inaudible 01:21] that I didn't like. [laughs]
CHARITY: [inaudible 01:23] tongue sting? Then I'm in. [laughs]
VICTORIA: Yeah, [inaudible 01:26].
WILL: See, I'm the opposite. I want something smooth. I'm a fruity drink type of guy. I'm just going, to be honest.
CHARITY: There's no shame in that.
WILL: No shame here. [laughs] Give me a margarita, and you have a happy Will for life. [laughs]
VICTORIA: We'll have to get you to come out and visit San Diego for some margaritas, Will. That's --
CHARITY: Oh yeah.
VICTORIA: Yeah, it's the place to be. Yeah, we do more of a bourbon drink in our house, like bourbon soda. That's usually what we make, like, my own custom simple syrup, and mix it with a little bourbon and soda water. And that's what we do for a cool down at the end of the day sometimes, yeah. Well, awesome.
Let's see. So, Charity, why don't you just tell me a little more about Honeycomb? What is it?
CHARITY: Well, it's a startup that hasn't failed yet, so... [laughs] to my own shock. [laughs] We're still around seven and a half years in. And I say that just so much joking. Like, you're not really supposed to say this as a founder, but, like, I 100% thought we were going to fail from the beginning. But we haven't yet, and we just got more money. So we'll be around for a while.
We kind of pioneered the whole concept of observability, which now doesn't really mean anything at all. Everybody and their mother is like, well, I do observability, too. But back when we started ta