Alignment gets expensive. Don’t skimp on it.

Honeycomb has doubled in size since I joined less than 2 years ago. More people means we can do more things at the same time. Both “more people” and “more things at the same time” lead to increased overhead. There’s coordination overhead to get timings right on work that’s independent. Like, to release a feature …

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a fire hydrant is sideways on the ground.

Run an OpenTelemetry Collector locally in Docker

This is an experience report for my future reference (and yours). The OpenTelemetry Collector is useful for receiving trace data in whatever format and exporting it to the back-end of your choice for storage and querying. For instance, I wanted to receive traces over HTTP/JSON from this sneaky browser extensionLINK and send them to Honeycomb. …

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Adding custom fields to Honeycomb traces in Rails by writing a Rack middleware

In our Rails app, installing the Honeycomb beeline magically gave us traces of all HTTP requests, with dozens of useful fields like ‘request.path’ and ‘response.status_code’. I really wanted the request verb (GET or POST) and I couldn’t find that. (It’s there, in ‘request.method’, I missed it. But still, it’s useful to know how to a …

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Honeycomb in Rails with separate dev and production events

Honeycomb made it suuuuuper easy to see traces of HTTP requests hitting my app. Right from my computer! We installed one gem, did one rails generate from a cut-and-paste their dataset creation page gave me. Start up rails server, hit http://localhost:3000, and boom! A thing on a graph in Honeycomb! That was cool. Except, um, …

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Honeycomb in Rails without hard-coding the API key

Today we hooked up Honeycomb to an app for the first time! It was easy and fun! Then we configured it so that we don’t have to commit our apikey. It’s a public repo. Anyone could grab our API key and send spurious events to our Honeycomb datasets, screwing up our information and costing us …

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