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.
105 articles from this blog
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.
A founder's reflection on evolving from an 'engineering-driven' to a more balanced company culture that equally values design, product, and business expertise.
Analyzes how cognitive biases like prevention bias and status-quo bias lead to inefficient software deployment practices like 'No Friday Deploys'.
Argues that software engineering interviews must include operations questions to ensure developers understand production systems and operational excellence.
Discusses the appropriate cost for an observability stack, suggesting a rule of thumb of 20-30% of infrastructure spend.
A critique of static dashboards for debugging, arguing they encourage pattern-matching over systematic problem-solving in software engineering.
Explores seven common career inflection points and archetypes for senior engineering managers, focusing on self-awareness over rigid planning.
A guide for engineering managers on career development, focusing on building essential leadership skills, understanding power dynamics, and creating a trusted peer network.
A guide on hiring engineering managers, focusing on the decision between promoting internal engineers versus hiring external candidates.
A cautionary tale about a database engineer who neglects her core technical duties for extracurricular activities, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing your primary job responsibilities.
Analyzes the high cost of delaying continuous deployment and advocates for automated, sub-15-minute deploy cycles to boost engineering efficiency.
A guide on how to ask strategic questions during job interviews to identify bad managers and unhealthy team cultures in tech roles.
Advice on prioritizing career growth and learning over immediate salary increases, especially for early-career software developers.
Explores the debate on whether engineering managers need strong technical skills or if management skills alone are sufficient.
An experienced manager discusses the psychological shift from engineer to manager, addressing how to find worth when your team does the implementation.
A guide to diagnosing and fixing slow CI/CD pipelines, focusing on reducing lead time to under 15 minutes with anti-patterns and optimization strategies.
An engineer grapples with the downsides of premature seniority, offering advice on when to leave a comfortable role to grow as a true senior.
