The Curious Engineer

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charity.wtf

charity.wtf

cofounder and CTO of honeycomb.io; pioneered modern observability. co-author of O'Reilly books "Database Reliability Engineering" and "Observability Engineering", now wrapping up the 2nd ed. loves free software, free speech, and peaty single malts. Click to read Charity Majors, a Substack with thous

DevOps / SRE / infrastructureEngineering management / careersAI / ML

’15’16’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
130 from 27 Dec 2015 to 8 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (18 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://charity.wtf/feed

2026 13

  1. If your team is happy, are you doing a good job?
  2. Where do AI norms come from?
  3. Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob
  4. Have you heard? Clickhouse is winning the observability wars! <-- THIS IS SARCASM
  5. In defense of AI mandates
  6. Is it ethical to use AI?
  7. AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less
  8. AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy
  9. Your Data Is Made Powerful By Context (so stop destroying it already)
  10. My (hypothetical) SRECon26 keynote
  11. First I wrote the wrong book, then I wrote the right book
  12. Martin Fowler told me the second edition should be shorter (it's twice as long)
  13. Bring Back Ops Pride

2025 17

  1. On Friday Deploys: Sometimes that Puppy Needs Murdering
  2. 2025 was for AI what 2010 was for cloud
  3. Hello World
  4. Moving from WordPress to Substack
  5. From Cloudwashing to O11ywashing
  6. How many pillars of observability can you fit on the head of a pin?
  7. Got opinions on observability? I could use your help (once more, with feeling)
  8. Are you an experienced software buyer? I could use some help.
  9. How We Migrated the Parse API From Ruby to Golang (Resurrected)
  10. Thoughts on Motivation and My 40-Year Career
  11. In Praise of “Normal” Engineers
  12. On How Long it Takes to Know if a Job is Right for You or Not
  13. On Pronouns, Policies and Mandates
  14. On Dropouts and Bootstraps
  15. On Writing, Social Media, and Finding the Line of Embarrassment
  16. Another observability 3.0 appears on the horizon
  17. Corporate “DEI” is an imperfect vehicle for deeply meaningful ideals

2024 9

  1. On Versioning Observabilities (1.0, 2.0, 3.0…10.0?!?)
  2. “Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmaking
  3. There Is Only One Key Difference Between Observability 1.0 and 2.0
  4. How Hard Should Your Employer Work To Retain You?
  5. Is It Time To Version Observability? (Signs Point To Yes)
  6. Pragmatism, Neutrality and Leadership
  7. Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you
  8. The Cost Crisis in Observability Tooling
  9. Questionable Advice: “My boss says we don’t need any engineering managers. Is he right?”

2023 11

  1. Becoming An Engineering Manager Can Make You Better At Life And Relationships
  2. LLMs Demand Observability-Driven Development
  3. How to Communicate When Trust Is Low (Without Digging Yourself Into A Deeper Hole)
  4. Helicopter Management and Other Mistakes
  5. Questionable Advice: “How can I drive change and influence teams…without power?”
  6. Ritual Brilliance: How a pair of Shrek ears shaped Linden Lab culture by making failure funny — and safe
  7. Choose Boring Technology Culture
  8. Questionable Advice: “People Used To Take Me Seriously. Then I Became A Software Vendor”
  9. Architects, Anti-Patterns, and Organizational Fuckery
  10. Deploys Are The ✨WRONG✨ Way To Change User Experience
  11. How to Throw A Company Offsite In A “Post-COVID” World

2022 13

  1. Every Achievement Has A Denominator
  2. The Future of Ops is Platform Engineering
  3. The Hierarchy Is Bullshit (And Bad For Business)
  4. Rituals for Engineering Teams
  5. Live Your Best Life With Structured Events
  6. Giving Good Feedback: Consider the Ratio
  7. Questionable Advice: Is there a path back from CTO to engineer?
  8. Why On-Call Pain Is A Sociotechnical Problem
  9. Advice for Engineering Managers Who Want to Climb the Ladder
  10. The Truth About “MEH-TRICS”
  11. Twin Anxieties of the Engineer/Manager Pendulum
  12. How can you tell if the company you’re interviewing with is rotten on the inside?
  13. How “Engineering-Driven” Leads to “Engineering-Supremacy”

2021 16

  1. Why I hate the phrase “breaking down silos”
  2. Software deploys and cognitive biases
  3. Why every software engineering interview should include ops questions
  4. How Much Should My Observability Stack Cost?
  5. Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards
  6. Engineering Manager Archetypes and Career Paths
  7. Career Development For Engineering Managers
  8. How To Hire An Engineering Manager
  9. Questionable Advice: “What Should I Say In My Exit Interview?”
  10. Know your “One Job”, continued
  11. Know your “One Job” and do it first
  12. How much is your fear of continuous deployment costing you?
  13. Questionable Advice: “How can I sniff out bad managers while interviewing for a job?”
  14. Questionable Advice: Premature Senior Followup Q’s
  15. Should Engineering Managers Be Technical?
  16. Questionable Advice: “How do I feel worthwhile as a manager when my people are doing all the implementing?”

2020 14

  1. “Why are my tests so slow?” A list of likely suspects, anti-patterns, and unresolved personal trauma.
  2. Questionable Advice: The Trap of The Premature Senior
  3. On Call Shouldn’t Suck: A Guide For Managers
  4. Things to know about engineering levels
  5. If Management Isn’t A Promotion, Then Engineering Isn’t A Demotion
  6. Questionable Advice: War Rooms? Really?!?
  7. The Official, Authorized List Of Legitimate Reasons For Deciding to Become a Manager
  8. Questionable Advice: “What’s the critical path?”
  9. How to make boba at home…without ruining any pans, making yourself ill, or ending up with a soggy, blobby mess
  10. Questionable Advice: Can Engineering Productivity Be Measured?
  11. Trolley Problems as a Service
  12. Good Days, Bad Days, Impossible Days
  13. Quarantine Reading Queue on the “Tiger King” Phenomenon
  14. Observability is a Many-Splendored Definition

2019 15

  1. Questionable Advice #2: How Do I Get My Team Into Observability?
  2. Questionable Advice: “After Being A Manager, Can I Be Happy As A Cog?”
  3. A Manager’s Bill of Responsibilities (and Rights)
  4. Deploys: It’s Not Actually About Fridays
  5. SLOs Are The API For Your Engineering Team
  6. The (Real) 11 Reasons I Don’t Hire You
  7. Love (and Alerting) in the Time of Cholera (and Observability)
  8. 17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager
  9. Friday Deploy Freezes Are Exactly Like Murdering Puppies
  10. On pain, careers, and doing things the hard way.
  11. Outsource Your O11y: Now Roll It Out And Keep Them Happy (part 3/3)
  12. Outsource Your O11y: Get Aligned With Security (part 2/3)
  13. Outsource Your O11y: How To Be A Champion (part 1/3)
  14. Logs vs Structured Events
  15. Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder

2018 9

  1. Software Sprawl, The Golden Path, and Scaling Teams With Agency
  2. Ten Platform Commandments
  3. How to Run a Tech Leadership Skill Share
  4. Shipping Software Should Not Be Scary
  5. On Engineers and Influence
  6. An Engineer’s Bill of Rights (and Responsibilities)
  7. Post-mortem: feminist advice meltdown (March 2nd)
  8. Money, power and credibility
  9. Company Values: A Resentful Odyssey

2017 1

  1. The Engineer/Manager Pendulum

2016 10

  1. The Accidental DBA
  2. DevOps vs SRE: delayed coverage of the dumbest war
  3. Operational Best Practices #serverless
  4. WTF is operations? #serverless
  5. Scrapbag of useful Terraform tips
  6. Nail polish: the superior paint
  7. Terraform, VPC, and why you want a tfstate file per env
  8. AWS Networking, Environments and You
  9. Two weeks with Terraform
  10. How to survive an acquisition

2015 2

  1. 2015 in recaps and life changes
  2. Hello world