On episode 88 of o11ycast, Ken Rimple and Jessica Kerr speak with Charity Majors about the shifting role of observability in modern software development. From AI-assisted instrumentation to reducing developer cognitive load, the episode examines how teams can move from reactive monitoring to continuous learning. It’s a deep dive into observability as a sense-making practice, not just a tooling problem.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

On episode 87 of o11ycast, Ken Rimple and Jessica Kerr sit down with Lada Kesseler to explore how experienced engineers can work effectively with AI coding assistants. They discuss why AI feels like a fast, noisy black box, and how patterns like semantic zooming, feedback loops, testing, and observability can help developers stay in control. This episode is a deep dive into using AI without sacrificing clarity, quality, or trust.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 86 of o11ycast, Ken Rimple and Jessica Kerr sit down with Amarilis Campos from Nubank. They explore how Brazil’s largest digital bank uses observability to build resilience and autonomy at scale. Amarilis shares how Nubank’s culture of “acting like owners, not renters” and its journey from metrics and logs to tracing with Honeycomb helped the company grow to over 100 million customers.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 85 of o11ycast, Dr. Cat Hicks unpacks AI’s impact on software teams from a psychological and social-science perspective. Along with Ken, Jess, and Austin, she explores how AI magnifies long-standing tensions between solitary and collaborative models of development, and how fears about AI often reflect deeper issues like undervaluing collaboration or having unrealistic productivity expectations. The discussion also explores empathy, theory of mind, and pluralistic ignorance, highlighting why developers may prepare more for AI than for each other.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 84 of o11ycast, Ken Rimple and Martin Thwaites welcome Maddy Montaquila, lead PM for .NET Aspire at Microsoft. This episode dives into the "magic" of Aspire, exploring how it streamlines the developer experience from frictionless app startup to telemetry-rich development. Discover how Aspire makes telemetry a first-class citizen, simplifying debugging and enhancing observability for modern applications.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 83 of o11ycast, the Honeycomb team chats with Dan Ravenstone, the o11yneer. Dan unpacks the crucial, often underappreciated, role of the observability engineer. He discusses how this position champions the user, bridging the gap between technical performance and real-world customer experience. Learn about the challenges of mobile observability, the importance of clear terminology, and how building alliances across an organization drives successful observability practices.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 82 of o11ycast, Ken and Jess chat with Morgante Pell, the visionary behind Grit, an AI-powered agent designed to automate developer toil and technical debt. The discussion covers the evolution of AI in coding, the challenges of building and deploying AI agents, the future of combining code awareness with production awareness, and Grit’s acquisition by Honeycomb.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 81 of o11ycast, Charity Majors and Martin Thwaites dive into a lively discussion with Hazel Weakly and Matt Klein on the evolving landscape of observability. The guests explore the concept of observability versioning, the challenges of cost and ROI, and the future of observability tools, including the potential convergence with AI and business intelligence.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 80 of o11ycast, Ken Rimple and Jessica Kerr chat with Kent Beck about the emerging world of AI-assisted coding. Beck shares his experiences with "augmented coding," discussing the benefits, challenges, and the evolving relationship between developers and AI agents. They explore how these tools are changing software development practices and what it means for the future of coding.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 79 of o11ycast, Hamel Husain joins the o11ycast crew to discuss the challenges of monitoring AI systems, why off-the-shelf metrics can be misleading, and how error analysis is the key to making AI models more reliable. Plus, insights into how Honeycomb built its Query Assistant and what teams should prioritize when working with AI observability.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

Episode 78 of o11ycast examines the world of OpenTelemetry Transformation Language (OTTL) with Tyler Helmuth and Evan Bradley, the maintainers behind this innovative framework. Discover how OTTL enables powerful telemetry data transformations, its practical applications, and what lies ahead for OpenTelemetry's transformative ecosystem.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 77 of o11ycast, Charity, Martin, Ken, and Jess welcome Jeremy Morrell to talk about OpenTelemetry, the future of observability, and how small teams can get started. Jeremy shares stories of debugging breakthroughs, adopting standards, and building tools that help engineers focus on what matters.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 76 of o11ycast, Jessica Kerr and Martin Thwaites speak with Andrew Keller, Principal Engineer at ObservIQ, about the evolving world of telemetry and observability. They explore the role of OpenTelemetry, the groundbreaking Open Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP), and how open standards are shaping the future of data pipelines. Learn how ObservIQ’s innovations help standardize telemetry collection and empower organizations with dynamic, scalable tools for managing their observability ecosystems.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 75 of o11ycast, Daniel Ravenstone and Adriana Villela dive into the challenges of adopting observability and OpenTelemetry in modern organizations. From breaking down vendor loyalty to getting developers to see the value of instrumentation, they explore how to foster a culture of curiosity and collaboration to make observability a core part of development.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 74 of o11ycast, Liudmila Molkova unpacks the importance of semantic conventions in telemetry. The discussion highlights the challenge of agreeing on naming conventions, the role of working groups in maintaining these standards, and the potential for future integration with AI technologies. Liudmila underscores the importance of a shared, vendor-agnostic approach to telemetry, enabling smoother interoperability across platforms.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 73 of o11ycast, Jessica Kerr, Martin Thwaites, and Austin Parker speak with Animesh Koratana, founder and CEO of PlayerZero, about the future of observability with AI. Discover how PlayerZero leverages LLMs to democratize institutional knowledge, improve software quality, and make problem-solving more accessible to all engineers.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

Episode 72 of o11ycast explores the world of mobile observability with Hanson Ho, Android Architect at Embrace. Hanson unpacks how mobile's diverse device landscape impacts data collection and performance monitoring, the role of OpenTelemetry in simplifying these challenges, and the importance of tailoring observability strategies to real-world user experiences. Join hosts Charity, Jess, and Austin for this insightful examination of an often overlooked observability niche.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In Episode 71 of o11ycast, Jessica Kerr and Austin Parker sit down with Shir Chorev to delve into the nuances of incorporating Generative AI into applications and testing the outcomes. Shir shares her journey from a data scientist to founding Deepchecks, driven by her vision to enhance the quality and reliability of machine learning and AI in real-world scenarios. Gain valuable insights on how LLMs are reshaping the development landscape, making advanced projects more accessible, and strategies for mitigating adversarial use cases. Whether you're in DevOps, infrastructure, or just passionate about AI, this episode is packed with expert advice and cutting-edge information.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 70 of o11ycast, Jess and Martin speak with Dan Gomez Blanco of Skyscanner. Dan shares his expertise on evangelizing better observability practices at Skyscanner and offers insights from his experience on the OpenTelemetry governance committee. Discover how observability can minimize organizational costs, the future of auto-instrumentation, and valuable advice on detecting and avoiding over-instrumentation. Plus, learn about the importance of tail sampling and OpenTelemetry’s semantic conventions.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 69 of o11ycast, Jess and Martin speak with Charles Herring of WitFoo. Together they dive deep into the world of cybercrime investigations. Discover the intricate processes of data collection and analysis in the realm of cybersecurity, all while balancing the imperative of cost-effectiveness and citizen privacy.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 68 of o11ycast, Jess and Martin speak with Michele Mancioppi of Dash0. This talk examines what it takes to make observability more accessible to non-experts in the space. Additional topics explored include the differences between monitoring and observability and Michele's shift from staff engineering to product management.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 67 of o11ycast, Martin, Jess, and Liz dive deep on performance engineering. Pulling heavily from Liz’s extensive experience in the field, they share insights on utilizing data to balance resources like developers’ time and infrastructure costs. Listeners can expect to learn helpful lessons on infrastructure optimization, performance data accessibility, and why Honeycomb embraced Kubernetes.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 66 of o11ycast, Jess and Martin speak with Iris Dyrmishi of Miro. They dive deep on what it takes to build an observability platform with open source tooling. Additionally, they explore the expense of outsourcing observability, the journey from logs to traces, tips for adopting new tools, and the spread of the FinOps movement.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 65 of o11ycast, Jess and Martin speak with Sophie DeBenedetto of GitHub. This talk explores observability at GitHub, the value of tracing, the BEAM ecosystem, the Elixir language, and insights on leveraging observability at scale.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 64 of o11ycast, Jessica Kerr and Martin Thwaites speak with Austin Parker of Honeycomb. This talk explores how observability within an organization provides a shared language between teams to discuss reliability. Other topics examined include numeronyms in the tech space, OpenTelemetry, and Kubernetes.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 63 of o11ycast, Charity and Jess speak with Lukas Fittl of pganalyze about database observability. This talk explores relational database management systems (DBMS), the open source library Sqlcommenter, query plans, and insights on supporting application teams.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 62 of o11ycast, Jessica Kerr and Martin Thwaites speak with Doug Ramirez of Uplight. This conversation covers many aspects of adopting OpenTelemetry including integration concerns, social challenges, building trust, and running it at scale. Listen in to find out why after 35 years of diverse experiences across several industries, Doug’s excited about observability.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 61 of o11ycast, Jessica and Martin speaks with Heidi Waterhouse of Sym. Together they explore the sensations of proprioception and interoception, how they relate to the future of observability, and the ways machine learning could assist in simplifying that future.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 60 of o11ycast, Jess and Martin speak with Todd Gardner of TrackJS and Winston Hearn of Honeycomb. This talk explores customer-centric observability, Request Metrics, Core Web Vitals, and insights on optimizing observability across different browsers.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 59 of o11ycast, Jess and Martin speak with Laura Maguire of Jeli and Nick Travaglini of Honeycomb. They unpack Learning From Incidents (LFI), resilience engineering, process tracing, safety science, key takeaways from the LFI Conference, and the human side of observability.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 58 of o11ycast, Jess and Liz speak with Brenna Moore of Second Dinner. This conversation explores game development and the many ways the industry has evolved, the infrastructure side of gaming, semantic conventions within the code, and career opportunities for developers aspiring to enter the field.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 57 of o11ycast, Jess and Martin speak with Shahar Azulay of Groundcover about monitoring Kubernetes applications, improving the UI experience of observability tools, and utilizing APMs. Shahar shares lessons learned from his storied career in R&D leadership positions, cyber security, machine learning and AI, as well as general advice for developers, SREs, project leaders, and executives.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 55 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Martin Thwaites, a developer advocate at Honeycomb. They discuss the dev side of observability, exploring topics like logging pipelines, the pain of context switching for developers, the significance of the DevOps movement, best practices for scaling engineering teams, and outside-in test-driven development.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 54 of o11ycast, Liz Fong-Jones and Jessica Kerr speak with Alex Boton of Lightstep. They discuss Alex’s book Cloud Native Observability with OpenTelemetry, OTel documentation and community, vendor lock-in, and the pain of instrumentation.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 53 of o11ycast, Charity Majors and Jessica Kerr speak with Jean Yang of Akita Software about legacy software, API-driven observability, tips for improving team efficiency, and insights on how observability can inform programming languages.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 52 of o11ycast, Charity and Jess speak with Alex Hidalgo of Nobl9. Alex shares his formative experiences advocating for reliability, insights on utilizing error budgets, and the attributes needed to leverage senior-level influence within a socio-technical environment.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 51 of o11ycast, Charity Majors and Jessica Kerr are joined by Henrik Rexed of Dynatrace. This conversation covers a wide array of software and observability topics including trends in performance engineering, insights on minimizing system complexity, the shortcomings of auto-instrumentation, and best practices for avoiding vendor lock-in.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 50 of o11ycast, Charity Majors and Jessica Kerr are joined by Benjamin Wilms of Steadybit. This conversation examines chaos engineering before production, identifying weak spots in your distributed system, and the health of the tech industry at large.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 49 of o11ycast, Charity Majors and Jessica Kerr speak with Fred Hebert of Honeycomb about incident commanders. Listen in for insights on the role of SREs, the educational value in incidents, improving feedback cycles, and choosing the right OKRs.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 48 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz chat with Adriana Villela of Tucows. They unpack Adriana's journey into observability, the community resources that lit her path, and her experience driving o11y at Tucows.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 47 of o11ycast, Liz Fong-Jones speaks with Gibbs Cullen of Chronosphere. Together they compare the roles of product managers and developer advocates, and discuss the phases of outcome-based observability.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 46 of o11ycast, Liz and Charity are joined by James Deville of Procore Technologies. James shares the insights he’s gained guiding o11y teams and the difficulties tech-forward teams face in non-tech sectors.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 45 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz are joined by Chris Holmes of Simply Business. Together they unpack OpenTelemetry, the importance of tracing, and the observability adoption process at Simply Business.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 44 of o11ycast, Liz and Charity speak with Vincent Behar of Ubisoft. Together they pull back the curtain on OpenTelemetry, exploring its popularity and standardization, as well as Vincent’s continuous journey to better understand the developer experience.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 43 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Apostolis (Toli) Apostolidis of Cinch. They discuss Cinch’s move from containers to serverless, lessons learned from Team Topologies, and advice on structuring your org with strategic constraints.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 42 of o11ycast, Charity and Shelby are joined by Dmitry Filimonov of Pyroscope. They discuss continuous profiling practices, use cases, and tools, as well as insights on how data is profiled at Pyroscope and how profiling resolution is measured.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 41 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Aaron Aldrich of Red Hat. Together they pull back the curtain on organizing conferences, accelerating feedback cycles, multi-tenancy debugging, and getting started with new tools.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 40 of o11ycast, Liz and Charity speak with Nick Herring of CCP Games. They discuss the challenges faced by engineers in the game space, the debugging procedure at CCP, and tactics for adopting large system changes.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 39 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Jordan Simonovski of Atlassian. They explore the differences between tracing and logging, tactics for measuring reliability, and the journey of the observability team at Atlasssian.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 38 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Andy Davies of Reaktor. Their conversation covers the importance of instrumentation, the prevalence of structured logging, and the potential risks of modifying database infrastructure.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 37 of o11ycast, Charity and Shelby speak with Garry Shutler of Cronofy. Together they pull back the curtain on building scheduling tools, making observability tools accessible to teams, and keeping deploys boring.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 36 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Jacob Scott of Stripe about the need for SRE teams, prioritizing customer happiness, and the limitations of distributed tracing tools.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 35 of o11ycast, Charity and Shelby speak with Mark Ferlatte of Truss. They discuss government software system failures and successes including Healthcare.gov and the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 34 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Jaana Dogan of AWS. They discuss Jaana’s career journey, life before observability tools, and reducing system complexity within large organizations.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 33 of o11ycast, Charity and Shelby are joined by Katy Farmer of CircleCI. They discuss learned helplessness, understanding complicated systems through direct experience, and championing devs to fail gracefully.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 32 of o11ycast, Liz and Shelby speak with Gianluca Arbezzano of Equinix Metal. They discuss diversifying the way observability is evangelized, the indicators that an organization has outgrown off-the-shelf tools, and managing hardware.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 31 of o11ycast, Charity Majors and Ellen Chisa of Dark discuss the benefits of making observability tools more accessible, tailoring feedback to individuals, and the many ways software may change in the years to come.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 30 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Beau Lyddon of Workday about the recent sea change in observability, the shortcomings of metrics, the role of senior engineers, and the responsibilities of corporations.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 29 of o11ycast, Charity and Shelby are joined by Glen Mailer of CircleCI. They discuss testing in production and rethinking socio-technical systems from the ground up.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 28 of o11ycast, Charity and Shelby speak with Austin Parker of Lightstep. They explore topics like rethinking human error, purposeful and intentional training, DevRel expectations, and underrated management tools.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 27 of o11ycast, Liz and Charity are joined by Corey Quinn of The Duckbill Group. They zero in on the point at which a system needs observability, shortening feedback loops for maximum impact, and practicing radical candor.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 26 of o11ycast, Charity and Shelby speak with Parveen Khan of Square Marble Technology. They discuss Parveen’s journey into observability and the insights she’s gained as a test engineer and quality advocate.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 25 of O11ycast, Charity and Shelby speak with Amy Tobey of Blameless. They explore the evolution of the SRE role, incident management, and the pains of rewriting system architecture.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 24 of O11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Heidi Waterhouse of LaunchDarkly. They discuss feature flags, value stream mapping, and quelling fear-driven development as a developer advocate.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 23 of O11ycast, Charity and Shelby speak with Erwin van der Koogh of Linc. They discuss the startup ecosystem in Australia, release engineering, and the relationship between safety and success.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 22 of O11ycast, Liz and Charity speak with Jimmy Bogard of Headspring. They discuss maintaining balance for on-call engineers, what’s missing in the average engineer’s toolkit, and moving from monoliths to microservices.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 21 of O11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Jessica Kerr. Together they explore complex learning systems, how to view outages as opportunities, and the power of feedback loops.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 20 of O11ycast, Charity and Shelby speak with Marco Rogers of Mode. They discuss the wall between dev and ops, application analysis, and wrangling vast amounts of data.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 19 of O11ycast, Liz and Charity speak with Shelby Spees of Honeycomb. They discuss Shelby’s diverse engineering background and how the software community has gradually pulled back the curtain on observability.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 18 of O11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Michael Hood, a senior staff performance engineer at Optimizely. They discuss real user monitoring (RUM), the shortcomings of traditional metrics, and ramping up observability.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 17 of O11ycast, Charity and Liz are joined by Pete Hodgson, an independent software delivery consultant. They discuss the DORA report, closing the CI/CD gap, and leveling up software delivery.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 16 of O11ycast, Charity and Liz are joined by Abby Bangser of MOO. They discuss observability from a testing engineer’s perspective, the key factors that lead a company to spin up a testing team, and the highlights of DeliveryConf 2020.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 15 of O11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Rachel Myers of Google and Emily Nakashima of Honeycomb. They discuss serverless development, customer-vendor relations, using logs correctly, and better understanding your data model.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 14 of O11ycast, Charity and Liz are joined by Mehdi Daoudi of Catchpoint. They discuss the importance of team players when scaling, as well as the hidden value in measuring the experience of your employees, not just your customers.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 13 of O11ycast, Charity Majors and Liz Fong-Jones talk with Natalie Bennett, Software Engineering Manager at Pivotal. They discuss the difference between collaborative projects and teams, continuous verification, and diagnosing failed deployments.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 12 of O11ycast, Charity Majors and Liz Fong-Jones speak with Rich Archbold of Intercom. They discuss the crucial importance of timely shipping, high-cardinality metrics, and the engineering value of running less software.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 11 of O11ycast, Charity Majors and Liz Fong-Jones speak with Gremlin chaos engineer Ana Medina. They discuss the relevance of breaking things in order to engineer them more efficiently, monitoring vs observability, and chaos engineering at scale.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 10 of O11ycast, Charity Majors and Liz Fong-Jones speak with Bugsnag CEO James Smith. They discuss the seemingly impossible ways an organization can measure technical debt and how they can attempt to reduce it.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 9 of o11ycast, Charity and Rachel sit down with Jez Humble, Co-Founder and CTO of DevOps Research and Assessments (acquired by Google since this session was recorded), to discuss DevOps security and how a team’s culture relates to their success.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 8 of O11ycast, Charity and Rachel are joined by Nylas Co-Founder and CTO Christine Spang to discuss navigating the complex ecosystem of emails and how Nylas has managed to create an API for it.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 7 of O11ycast, Charity is joined by fellow Honeycomb team member Michael Wilde along with Asana’s heads of engineering and tech, Cliff Chang and Phips Peter, to discuss how observability has shaped their organizations.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 6 of O11ycast, Charity and Rachel talk to Google developer advocate Liz Fong-Jones about ways to build systems to be more transparent and explainable.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 5 of O11ycast, Rachel and Charity speak with Anton Chuvakin, Research VP at Gartner for Technical Professionals, about the ways modern companies make, or don’t make, decisions around security.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 4 of O11ycast, Rachel and Charity ask Adam Jacob, co-founder and CTO of Chef, how the culture of DevOps has evolved both for system administrators and the companies they help build.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 3 of O11ycast, Rachel and Charity are joined by Paul Biggar, co-founder and CTO of Dark as well as founder of CircleCI, to discuss how microservices and automation have shaped the developer landscape.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode two of O11ycast, Rachel and Charity are joined by Christina Noren, Chief Product Officer for CloudBees, to look at the ways both the development life cycle and the role of the developer have evolved.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode one of O11ycast, Merian Ventures‘ Rachel Chalmers and Honeycomb.io‘s Charity Majors dive into a few ways observability can drive fundamental changes in the way we approach software development.

The post appeared first on Heavybit.