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
A guide for engineering managers on creating a sustainable and effective on-call culture, emphasizing shared responsibility and operational best practices.
Explains why engineers may struggle to level up, focusing on company-specific opportunities, project availability, and business needs.
Challenges the view that management is a promotion and engineering a demotion, arguing for cultural change in tech organizations.
A critique of traditional 'war room' monitoring centers, arguing they are ineffective and harmful compared to automated observability and developer ownership.
A candid look at the real, often unspoken reasons engineers become managers, challenging the typical 'selfless' narratives.
A discussion on defining a software team's 'critical path' by focusing on business-critical processes that directly impact revenue and customer experience.
An engineering manager debates the feasibility of measuring individual developer productivity, arguing against simplistic metrics in creative technical work.
A tech company discusses running monthly ethical dilemma workshops to prepare employees for complex, real-world decision-making in the industry.
A critique of how 'observability' is often incorrectly defined as just metrics, logs, and traces, explaining its true meaning from control theory.
Advice on convincing engineering teams to adopt observability practices, debunking myths and offering practical strategies.
A tech industry veteran shares their experience transitioning from engineer to manager, detailing the challenges and questioning if they can return to an individual contributor role.
A guide outlining the rights and responsibilities of engineering managers, focusing on feedback, team care, and leadership principles.
A response to criticism of Friday software deployments, arguing that a healthy, low-risk deploy ecosystem is better for engineers than blanket bans.
Explains how Service Level Objectives (SLOs) act as an abstraction layer to define boundaries and improve collaboration between engineering teams and management.
A tech founder explains the most common, non-personal reasons candidates aren't hired, focusing on startup hiring realities like role scarcity and team fit.
A guide to modernizing alerting practices in distributed systems, advocating for observability, SLOs, and paging only on user-impacting issues.
Explores intrinsic reasons why a senior software engineer might choose to remain an individual contributor instead of pursuing a management career path.
Argues against Friday deploy freezes, explaining how they create technical debt, hurt team productivity, and indicate a fear of deployment that should be fixed.
A software engineer shares a personal story of overcoming a fear of public speaking and reflects on the complex role of pain in career growth.
Final part of a series on successfully integrating and maintaining a third-party observability service while collaborating with security teams.
