Honeycomb.io | Full-time | Remote, authorized to work in the US + Canada | Product Manager, Customer Success Eng, Product Eng, Eng Manager, Account Exec
Honeycomb is built to help engineering teams deeply explore and understand their own production systems — in real time. It's a service for the near and present future, where distributed systems are the new default, every service is a platform, and empowered generalist software engineers are the new ops. We are passionate about consumer-quality developer tools and excited to build a product that raises our industry's expectations of what our tools can do for us.
Job links (and threads by the hiring managers!) can be found here:
> I find it a huge step backwards. As far as I know, there's no full text search and the types of reports and aggregation you can do are extremely primitive.
Oof. Honeycomb is for fast, realtime analytics: starting with a high-level question in your mind ("why did our throughput drop by 50%?") and rapidly iterating on a hypothesis (examples in [0]). ELK can... be used for that, but is optimized for another (as you said, full-text search and generating static reports).
Being able to flip from a funny-looking graph directly into "raw data" mode is intended to be a bonus in Honeycomb, not the primary way you interact with your data.
While we believe that fulltext search has its place, beyond a certain point (most production systems, these days), sifting through log lines is a brute-force method of answering questions about your systems — especially if you're not sure what the proverbial needle you're searching for looks like. [1]
(But mherdeg's answer is great, go back and read theirs while you're here :))
Totally, if all you care about is just that counter/gauge -- but more and more often, you need that counter/gauge captured for a particular segment of your traffic (e.g. some app-level identifier), and TSDBs tend to struggle[0] as the number of possible segments explodes.
If all you care about is overall latency, awesome! Use a TSDB. Once you care about latency per endpoint/user agent/customer ID/client platform (or combination thereof), you need the flexibility associated with structured log data, stored in something meant for fast analytical querying.
Honeycomb is also unapologetically a SaaS. We believe that - unless your company's core competency is, in fact, managing databases and a garden of myriad open-source monitoring tools - it makes sense for most people to outsource their observability solutions.
(We also don't currently support joins, while TimescaleDB's joins sound pretty dope :))
I'm intrigued by the fact that this has been on the front page for hours with no comments.
Is this because there's nothing to say ("Of course they're IPO'ing, everyone doing telephony uses Twilio, this makes total sense")? Or because the haters have all taken vacation and aren't around to draw comparisons to other recent IPOs?
... or are IPOs no longer news to the HN community anymore?
I think it's mostly the former. Unlike some IPOs, there's just nothing controversial about it. Twilio's a great product and they've got solid financials.
I imagine that, being steeped in the tech industry, you pay much more to our conversations than those of other industries. I would be hard-pressed to believe that other male-dominated or gender-skewed don't also think about these sorts of issues. Perhaps they just have other forums (like, say, Forbes magazine [1] or academic/industry journals [2]) to discuss them.
I didn't say there were none. I said most. Call me up when the trade organizations for construction, road work, plumbing, etc. have this as a topic of discussion on an almost weekly basis. Doesn't happen. Not to the extent it does with the tech industry.
My own personal theory, which is completely unsupported by anything other than my own experience and bias, is that it is a particular manifestation of the 'white knight' behavior that is so common among my peers.
Again, I am not saying that it is not a real issue, or that it is not worth discussing. I'm just pointing out that the tech industry has an unusual level of fixation on this issue.
At the heart of this gender dynamic is the need to separate the masculine from
the lesser valued feminine. Male nurses do this by employing strategies that
allow them to distance themselves from female colleagues and the
quintessential feminine image of nursing itself, as a prerequisite to elevating
their own prestige and power.
Now spin that into computer science and female and post it here. The fire will reach sky-high.
I call them uber for fun people! Even if lyft cost the same as uber, I would still take a lyft. Being able to joke around with the driver is worth more to me than leather seats and a free bottle of water.
It's fun until there's an accident. Then it wouldn't be fun at all. I'll gladly trade "joking with the driver" for a driver licensed and insured to drive other people. Companies like Lyft make a point of saying they aren't affiliated with the drivers and have no liability. That means you're depending on the driver's personal (likely state minimum) insurance.
For me, choosing to ride with vetted drivers who have the proper insurance is an easy choice. I'm willing to pay much more for that. If I feel the need to joke around with someone during the ride, I just bring a friend. It certainly costs more (all other things being equal), to have a properly insured driver come pick you up. I think it's worth it.
For me, "Fun" comes far down the list of things I look for in a transportation service. Safe cars, vetted drivers, quick pickups and professional service are all much more important to me than riding with a driver who is "fun" (or who put a mustache on the front of their car with the hopes of appearing fun). I've had a couple UberX rides now, and honestly, that's the sweet spot for me (affordable ride, clean cars, professional drivers, timely service, environmentally-friendly and properly insured). It hits all the things I'm looking for in a transportation service, at a price very close to a Taxi.
or InstantCab, which works directly with cab drivers - who are motivated to provide good customer service, instead of cab companies which are generally glorified car rental companies that only provide customer service for legacy reasons and don't care about it.
Could have been me, I drive an old(ish) Toyota, but I would have asked you about 280 North. So it must have been someone else.
We are still in beta and so we usually have a backup driver, often one of us, who'll go and pickup customers if there is no taxi nearby. It's been quite interesting meeting people this way. I think I have had 5 "office hours" with Justin Kan this way :)
I asked the driver if they worked at InstantCab and it sounded like a part time thing for him. It might not have been a Toyota.
Anyway, I wouldn't have minded if I had expected it. My girlfriend was skeptical, and I wouldn't expect her to get in some random car if I wasn't with her.
I'd suggest asking riders if they're ok with a backup driver picking them up first (assuming this is even legal...)
I'll give it another try. I hope you guys succeed. TaxiMagic and Cabulous never work for me precisely because drivers will cancel your pickup at the drop of a hat if they find a closer pickup, and there's no feedback mechanism to discourage this.
The average cab driver skips a couple of hails to pick up someone a few blocks away. So, in addition to the feedback mechanism (which is coming), the driver needs an assurance that the customer will be there when they show up. By asking you for a credit card when you register, we do this a little bit better. With some competitors, even when the customer registers with a credit card, the money first goes to the taxi company, not to the driver. The company deducts a processing fee (often over 10%, 5% in SF), and may hold the money for several days (3 days in SF for some companies, two weeks in other places!).
We fix this mess for the driver, and they are incentivized to provide better service because of this. These are interesting times in the ground transportation space, with all the activity from Uber, taxis, and ridesharing folks and there is much debate about regulation. Ultimately, I hope this results in a better, sustainable solution for everyone involved.
