June 2020 Summaries

Dark is a programming language and platform designed for building serverless backends, which simplifies software delivery by eliminating infrastructure and deployment challenges. The Dark team adopted Honeycomb for observability-driven development, transitioning from relying on logs to utilizing structured observability for enhanced performance tuning and user behavior insights. This shift allowed them to execute rich queries, use distributed tracing, and create interactive visualizations that improved system optimization and user experience. Honeycomb's operational boards provided valuable insights that delayed the need for a full-scale business analytics platform, revealing user traffic patterns and assisting in real-time issue resolution. The team also integrated Rollbar for error reporting, correlating its data with Honeycomb for comprehensive incident analysis. As they continue to expand Honeycomb's use, the Dark team plans to enhance their tracing capabilities and explore schema consolidation to gain clearer insights across their data set, which has led them to replace Stackdriver with Honeycomb for most monitoring tasks.

Test-Driven Development (TDD) has been a cornerstone of software development, ensuring code quality by running tests in isolated environments, but it falls short in addressing real-world production challenges. Observability-Driven Development (ODD) emerges as a complementary approach that emphasizes understanding how software behaves in live environments by using real data from production. ODD encourages developers to embrace failures and unpredictability, continuously instrument their code, and routinely monitor its performance post-deployment, thereby closing the feedback loop between development and production. By making observability an integral part of the development process, engineers can gain insights into user interactions, maintain higher code standards, and ultimately create more robust and user-friendly software.

Honeycomb, a company specializing in observability for software engineering teams, has been granted U.S. patent No. 10,635,830 for its Secure Tenancy feature, which enhances security for accessing sensitive production data. This technology enables enterprise customers to maintain security through encrypted data and keys managed on-site via a Secure Proxy, ensuring that Honeycomb never accesses the data or security keys directly. This innovation, developed in response to rising demands from sectors such as healthcare and financial services, aligns with Honeycomb's commitment to enterprise-class security, as evidenced by its SOC 2, Type II certification and HIPAA compliance. CEO Christine Yen highlighted Secure Tenancy as a testament to Honeycomb's proactive approach to customer security needs. Skedulo, a Honeycomb client, praised the feature for enabling secure observability without compromising client privacy, thereby meeting stringent HIPAA requirements. This announcement coincides with Honeycomb's introduction of new pricing models to facilitate broader adoption of its observability platform.

Honeycomb CTO and co-founder Charity Majors advocates for moving beyond Test-Driven Development (TDD) to improve software performance in production, introducing the concept of Observability Driven Development (ODD) in her contribution to The New Stack. She emphasizes the importance of incorporating observability into the development process, encouraging developers to follow their curiosity and explore where this approach leads them in order to create better functioning software.