Charity Majors is a prominent voice in DevOps and operations, advocating for strong operational ownership and better production tooling. She writes about observability, engineering culture, and why operations is a critical, respected engineering discipline.
121 articles from this blog
Explores the personal and professional growth from transitioning to an engineering manager role, challenging past biases against management.
Explains why traditional debugging fails for LLMs and advocates for observability-driven development to manage their non-deterministic nature in production.
A critique of common management failures in tech and a guide to becoming a supportive, transparent, and people-focused engineering manager.
A senior engineer shares advice on driving technical change and influencing teams without formal authority, based on a conference talk Q&A.
A former engineer reflects on how Linden Lab's 'Shrek ears' tradition turned production failures into a positive, team-building ritual.
Honeycomb's CEO discusses the company's 'boring technology culture' philosophy, distinguishing between formal organizational structure and informal team dynamics.
A software engineer turned vendor discusses the loss of credibility and offers advice on how to be taken seriously when selling software.
A critical analysis of the 'architect' role in software engineering, exploring its common anti-patterns and organizational dysfunction.
Argues that deploys and releases are distinct concepts and that relying on deploys to change user experience is problematic.
Argues that leadership impact should be measured by results per team member, not by the size of the organization managed.
Explores the evolution of operations into platform engineering, where teams focus on enabling developers through self-service platforms and managed services.
A critique of traditional corporate hierarchies in tech, arguing they harm fulfillment and business by pushing people into management over their true passions.
Explores how intentional rituals can build belonging, engagement, and culture within engineering teams, with examples from past workplaces.
The article discusses the shift from traditional debugging methods like printf to modern observability tools and structured event systems for distributed applications.
A guide on giving effective feedback in tech teams, emphasizing the importance of balancing critique with specific, meaningful praise.
Advice for former CTOs wanting to return to hands-on engineering roles, discussing skill refresh and career transition strategies.
Explores why on-call rotations are often painful, framing them as a sociotechnical problem requiring both technical fixes and organizational changes.
Advice for engineering managers on making the leap to director, covering role definitions, promotion strategies, and mindset shifts.
A critique of traditional metrics for observability, arguing they are limited for debugging unknown issues but still valuable for system health monitoring.
Explores the common anxieties engineers face when transitioning between management and individual contributor roles, focusing on career path fears.
