https://honkathon.com/ Recent content in HONKATHON on honkathon Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sat, 01 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://honkathon.com/2023-07-12-becoming-a-vp-engineering-part-2/ Wed, 12 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://honkathon.com/2023-07-12-becoming-a-vp-engineering-part-2/ This post is part of a short series about my experience in the VP of Engineering role at Honeycomb. The first post is Part 1: Doing the Job. Charity once said an off-hand sentence that became a mantra for my transition into the VP of Engineering role: “Directors run the company.” This was said in the context of thinking about how the various management roles around the company interact: line managers run teams and projects, directors run the day-to-day work of the company, and execs (including VPs) focus above all on strategy, external-facing matters, and longer-term planning for the company’s future. https://honkathon.com/2023-07-11-becoming-a-vp-engineering-part-1/ Tue, 11 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://honkathon.com/2023-07-11-becoming-a-vp-engineering-part-1/ This post is part of a short series about my experience in the VP of Engineering role at Honeycomb. In February of 2020, I was promoted from Director of Engineering to Honeycomb’s first VP of Engineering. Although Charity wrote an extremely generous public announcement, I hesitated to talk about this new role for quite a while as I was figuring out the job. But since 2020, I’ve noticed how little candid writing there is about paths to the VPE role or what the job is really like. https://honkathon.com/2023-01-04-reparations/ Wed, 04 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://honkathon.com/2023-01-04-reparations/ I am a beneficiary of reparations. Here’s why I support reparations for Black Americans. This month, a Monmouth University poll showed that 76 percent of Americans, and 71 percent of white Americans, believe that racial and ethnic discrimination is a “big problem” in the United States. Just a few years ago, little more than half of white Americans believed that. -Nikole Hannah-Jones, ”What Is Owed: It Is Time for Reparations” https://honkathon.com/2022-08-19-eng-managers-bill-of-rights/ Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://honkathon.com/2022-08-19-eng-managers-bill-of-rights/ or, the small crisis with engineering line management In 2018, Honeycomb co-founder & CTO Charity Majors wrote a blog post titled, “An Engineer’s Bill of Rights (and Responsibilities).” The post describes how, in most software engineering organizations, power naturally accrues to managers—and also makes the case that it’s important to limit this accrual in some ways, guaranteeing certain conditions for engineering ICs, rather than leaving every aspect of their experience up to the whims of (often inexperienced, sometimes power-hungry) engineering managers. https://honkathon.com/2021-05-29-notes-on-asian-solidarity/ Sat, 29 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://honkathon.com/2021-05-29-notes-on-asian-solidarity/ Note: I started writing this before the March 16 Atlanta shootings. Like many, many Americans, I am outraged and saddened by the events in Atlanta, and the overwhelming response to those events has informed some of what is captured here. This post also attempts to collect observations about other events from 2020 and early 2021. I’ll try to make distinctions between pre- and post-Atlanta observations clear where relevant. Since the start of the pandemic, hate crimes against Asian Americans have increased dramatically, fueled by Trump’s racist rhetoric : “Kung Flu”, “Chinese Virus,” etc. https://honkathon.com/talks/ Mon, 30 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://honkathon.com/talks/ Upcoming CTO Summit 2021 Favorites o11ycon, Observability is for User Happiness (2018) Monitorama PDX, What Your Javascript Does When You’re Not Around (2016) More 2021 Failover Conf: Panel Discussion: The Evolution of Observability & Monitoring 2020 #PerfMatters, Observability for Web Perf CTO Summit SF 2020, Hiring is Broken 2019 performance.now(), Amsterdam, DevOpsDays Des Moines, The Incremental Path to Observability Optimizely Test & Learn, Building and Deploying Resilient Products 2018 o11ycon, Observability is for User Happiness QCon New York, Help! https://honkathon.com/2019-09-29-a-sad-love-song-about-chat-backchannels/ Sun, 29 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://honkathon.com/2019-09-29-a-sad-love-song-about-chat-backchannels/ I love a good chat backchannel. I’ve gone on vacations with my backchannels. I have enamel pins, stickers, and other custom merch from backchannels. I’ve landed at least three jobs via backchannel connections. I’ve listened and strategized with backchannel members who were getting shut out, pushed out, or overlooked, and I’ve been there to celebrate as backchannel friends went from ICs to managers, directors, executives, founders, and investors. I’ve made some of my best friends in backchannels. https://honkathon.com/2019-08-18-power-bends-light/ Sun, 18 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://honkathon.com/2019-08-18-power-bends-light/ I truly want to be a big company person, but I am a generalist who gets bored easily, and the reality is that I love startups. It’s true that most things at most startups are perpetually on fire, but if you can accept that, there is a lot to like. One well-known one: at a fast-growing startup, a hard-working, talented person who has some support from company leadership* can often acquire an impressive title (or at least a lot of de facto power) very quickly. https://honkathon.com/2015-04-16-why-job-titles-matter-if-you-care-about-diversity/ Thu, 16 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://honkathon.com/2015-04-16-why-job-titles-matter-if-you-care-about-diversity/ The first time I took a job at a company that didn’t really “do” job titles, I remember feeling like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I was leaving an environment where managerial power plays and career ambitions had sometimes been put before team productivity or happiness, and I felt like I had suddenly been liberated from all of the petty political angling that surrounded promotions and fights for seniority. https://honkathon.com/2014-07-25-sunset-testing-for-short-lived-code/ Fri, 25 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://honkathon.com/2014-07-25-sunset-testing-for-short-lived-code/ Rachel Myers and I talked about Sunset Testing in our talks at O’Reilly’s Fluent Conf 2014 and Front-End Ops Conf, and a number of people asked us if we had a blog post on the topic that they could share with their coworkers. We didn’t, so here it is, somewhat belatedly. When I write some javascript to work around a browser compatibility bug or some custom ruby to show different configurations for an A/B test, I always have to get past a bad feeling before checking it in. https://honkathon.com/2014-02-01-3rd-party-javascript-checklist/ Sat, 01 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://honkathon.com/2014-02-01-3rd-party-javascript-checklist/ I’ve been enjoying Ben Vinegar & Anton Kovalyov’s Third-Party Javascript and would recommend it to anyone who is looking to build their front-end expertise, not just to those working on third-party scripts. One thing the book doesn’t provide, but that I found myself wanting, was a short checklist to run through while evaluating vendors or scripts. So here’s my stab at that, with some of my own concerns mixed in with ideas from the book. https://honkathon.com/2013-11-03-just-enough-web-perf/ Sun, 03 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://honkathon.com/2013-11-03-just-enough-web-perf/ How to get started with web performance optimization in five steps At ModCloth, I was lucky enough to have dedicated time to focus on web performance optimization. I spent a full month totally focused on web perf and a few months after that with a dedicated percentage of my queue set aside for perf work. With this amount of time, my team was able to clean up thousands of lines of legacy javascript & css, update backend settings, and shave more than 500 ms off median load times for top pages.