S3 E18: Charity Majors, Honeycomb.io

Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Noah Labhart - Startup Founder & CTO

Tech News, News, Business, Technology, Entrepreneurship, Careers

4.6 • 216 Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2020

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Charity Majors didn't touch a computer until she was in college. In fact, she was raised in a religious, fundamentalist compound in rural Idaho, homeschooled and cultivating all of her own food. She went to college to study classical performance in piano. And though she loved piano, she decided to switch keyboards, so to speak, and pursue something in computers. Been in San Francisco since she was 19, and never wants to leave. Outside of tech, she does some hand lettering as a hobby, reads a lot - and considers serial television as the highest modern art form. She is firmly motivated by using code to get stuff done - IE she doesn't do tech for fun. And in her words, she's made a niche out of being an infrastructure engineer. Several years ago, she was the first infrastructure hire at Parse. While supporting the mobile backend as a service before and after the Facebook acquisition, she had access toa tool where she could slice and dice her infrastructure, to gain visibility into a particular section of services and answer questions. When she left - she realized that a tool of that nature was paramount to doing her job well. So she set out to build it again, and figure out how to coin the term observability. This is the creation story of Honeycomb.io. Our Sponsors: * Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.com * Check out Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com * Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORY Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm a little embarrassed to a minute now. I had this vehemently anti-product manager sort of stance. I didn't want any of them to touch my product. It felt to me like giving up control. It felt to me like giving up the vision. Like I've never wanted to build a team where engineers just take orders. That's what it represented to me.
0:22.5	I'm from ops.
0:23.7	Every single year, I've been like, like every year I've been like, well, this is definitely the year we're going to fail.
0:29.8	And this is the first year that I'm like, we might not fail, which might mean that we're doomed.
0:37.6	My name is Charity Measures.
0:39.5	I'm the CTO and co-founder of honeycomb.io.
0:47.8	This is Code Story, a podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries who share in the critical moments of what it takes to change in industry and build and lead a team that has your back.
1:02.3	I'm your host, Noel LaVart, and today how charity majors coined the term observability and built a tool to surface the relevant infrastructure bits.
1:14.0	All this and more on Code Story.
1:19.3	Charity majors didn't touch a computer until she was in college. In fact, she was raised in a religious
1:24.9	fundamentalist compound in rural Idaho, homeschooled and
1:28.6	cultivating all of her own food.
1:31.2	She went to college to study classical performance in piano.
1:34.4	And though she loved piano, she decided to switch keyboards, so to speak, and pursue something
1:38.6	in computers.
1:40.0	She's been in San Francisco since she was 19 and never wants to leave. She's firmly motivated by using code to get stuff done, i.e. she doesn't do tech for fun.
1:50.0	Several years ago, she was the first infrastructure hire at PARSE.
1:53.0	While supporting the mobile backend as a service before and after the Facebook acquisition,
1:58.0	she had access to a tool where she could slice and dice her infrastructure
2:02.1	to gain visibility into a particular section of services and answer questions.
2:07.3	When she left, she realized that a tool of that nature was paramount to doing her job well.
2:12.7	So, she set out to build it again and figure out how to coin the term observability.
	...

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