Charity Majors - On database outages, journey as a co-founder, thriving under pressure and growing as an engineer - #7

Software Misadventures

Charity Majors (https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy) is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io. Before this she worked at Facebook, Parse and Linden Lab on infrastructure and developer tools, and always seemed to wind up running the databases. She is the co-author of Database Reliability Engineering book and also has an amazing blog at charity.wtf. We love the content in her blogs and have learned a lot from them.

We had a lot of fun speaking with Charity in this lively conversation! We learned about her journey from being an engineer to co-founding Honeycomb, what it was like being on-call when she was only 17, and staying calm during production incidents. We talked about various production outages throughout the episode and our favorite involved driving to a datacenter to flip a DB switch. Charity also shares what it takes to build an awesome engineering culture, the engineer/manager pendulum, and qualities Charity looks for when hiring senior engineers.