# Charity Majors: Deploys Are Just The Beginning

EP-005 | May 13, 2019 | 34:08



Topics: DevOps, Engineering Culture


Robby speaks with Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb. They discuss her work as an Infrastructure Engineer, how Honeycomb was created, all about working and testing in production, and why software engineers should be "on call" for their code.



## Guest

**Charity Majors** — Co-founder & CTO, Honeycomb

Co-founder of Honeycomb.io and a leading voice in observability and production engineering. Author and speaker on modern operations practices.



## Show Notes

Robby speaks with Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb about her work as an Infrastructure Engineer, how Honeycomb was created, all about working and testing in production, and why software engineers should be "on call" for their code.

## Helpful links

- Follow Charity [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy)
- [Honeycomb](https://www.honeycomb.io/)
- [The Honeycomb blog](https://blog.honeycomb.io/)
- [Charity's blog](https://charity.wtf/)
- [Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind](https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095)
- [Database Reliability Engineering](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920039761.do)

## Subscribe to Maintainable on:

- [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/maintainable/id1459893010)
- [Overcast](https://overcast.fm/itunes1459893010/maintainable)

Or search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.

[Join the discussion in the Maintainable Discord Community](https://discord.com/invite/u8BwA2kvyu)

**Loving Maintainable? Leave a rating and review** [**on Apple Podcasts**](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/maintainable/id1459893010) **to help grow our reach.**

_Brought to you by the team at_ [_Planet Argon_](https://www.planetargon.com/)_._






## Frequently Asked Questions


### What does Charity Majors say about observability vs monitoring?

Charity explains that observability is about asking new questions of your system in production, while monitoring checks known conditions. She recommends investing in observability tools that let you explore unknown-unknowns.


### How does Charity Majors view deployments?

Charity argues that deploys should be boring, frequent, and small. The goal is to make deployments so routine that they become a non-event, reducing risk and increasing confidence.


### What does Charity Majors recommend for production debugging?

Charity advocates for observability-driven development where engineers instrument their code and understand it in production. She believes the best debugging happens with real production data, not by trying to reproduce issues locally.





## Transcript