cyen

On Becoming a VP of Engineering, Part 2: Doing the Job https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/becoming-vp-of-engineering-pt2

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:

* Product Manager https://twitter.com/fishmegs/status/1290347660319154177

* Customer Success Engineer https://twitter.com/irvingpop/status/1280982010937241600

* Product Engineer https://jobs.lever.co/honeycomb/2605efc2-2f69-4193-bc21-4524...

* Engineering Manager https://jobs.lever.co/honeycomb/db0b0b03-930a-439a-a4ee-dea3...

> 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 :))

0: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/troubleshooting-in-honeycomb-c... 1: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/the-true-cost-of-search-first-...

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.

0: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/the-problem-with-pre-aggregate...

The Atlantic did a long-form article about this, if anyone is interested in further reading (with survey results!): https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the...

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 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.

1: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0316/072_terminated_women.... 2: http://folk.uio.no/olegmo/Men%20in%20Nursing/Evans%20J%20199...

Fixed - the OS X guide is actually combined with the iOS guide. Try again, from the link at https://parse.com/apps/quickstart#osx/blank !

(Check out side.cr and lyft.me! I've been calling them Uber for poor people.)

I'm still surprised that URL Schemes[1] aren't used widely. Facebook uses them to implement Facebook Connect, and sites exist[2] that try to aggregate various apps' schemes, but it'd be nice to live in a world where they were well-known and reliable enough to use instead of having to integrate individual third-party SDKs.

1: http://mobiledevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-appl... 2: http://handleopenurl.com/scheme

Very little of the Aardvark team is left at Google, and those who are are scattered across different teams.

You can already from the command line! git add -p (short for --patch) will let you individual hunks of a file to the staging area.

San Francisco, Venuetastic (YC W11)

Looking for a generalist engineer (intern or full-time) to be our first employee. Standard Rails stack, but candidates with experience in equivalent technologies are wholeheartedly welcome as well.

http://venuetastic.com/jobs

San Francisco (fulltime, intern)

Venuetastic (YC W11, http://venuetastic.com/jobs) is looking for generalist engineers to join the team and be part of a very early-stage, funded startup.

I started playing with it because I always thought Yahoo Pipes was cool but a bit heavy-handed for light things - and I've found myself going back to add more and more tasks. Plenty of services provide some of the functionality (Twitter alerts, etc), but require a separate signup or new login, while ifttt is flexible enough to take care of tons of different cases.

Some of my recently created tasks and the holes they plug:

* RSS feeds that aren't fine-grained enough for my needs (if there's a new item in The Atlantic's Entertainment RSS feed that matches "Game of Thrones," then email it to me)

* RSS feeds that I want to be updated about ASAP, but don't want to have to sign up for (if there's a new item for an eBay search I care about, then send me a message via GTalk)

* Lightweight Twitter alerts (if there's a new tweet that mentions X, then send me a message via GTalk)

Other cool examples of ifttt flows:

http://craigt.co.uk/blog/?p=146

http://web-mastered.de/post/4748705681/iffft-dropbox-update

http://blog.christineyen.com/2011/05/how-i-use-ifttt/

tl;dr - really lightweight, well-designed version of yahoo pipes that is genuinely fun to use.

Having to download a native app and having to create an account are two entirely separate matters.

And FTR, part of the advantage of native apps is that they'll never be relegated to "just another browser tab" or lost in a sea of favicons. When I'm going to invest time in a workflow / application / product, I almost always prefer the native app to web app for this particular reason.

The #1 reason I still use post-its on my laptop and monitor (and... sometimes physically on my phone, in extreme cases): there's a real-world reminder that sticks around when you're powered off, disconnected, etc.

They're brightly colored, often aren't stuck on at right angles, and frankly refuse to be ignored. They're just the right amount of annoying, and I'll be interested to see how digital GTD applications manage to toe that line.

Mobile's going to be an increasingly interesting strategy with local businesses. When these owners and workers are running their business, they're not running into the back room to check computers or laptops or websites - but they do have their phones and can often step aside to respond to a quick SMS. I imagine Talkbin has caught on to this - lots of other startups don't seem to - and this really feels like a product where everyone benefits in the end.

Heroku / EC2 are seeing intermittent connectivity issues - try again in a bit?

Grin - but you'll remember it the next time someone mentions needing a venue, won't you?

Thanks! We went back and forth finding a balance between the relatively complex constraints some people have in looking for a venue, versus a cleaner interface + fewer features. This is noted :) and we'll noodle on it a bit more going forward.

An alternative is being encouraged to go into product / management roles (read: out of engineering) because you've got "communication skills."

It's a little absurd to about the simple changes / features necessary (variables? nesting? c'mon) to make CSS bearable again (if it ever was).

Then you take a look at some of the additional goodies - fadeout(), desaturate(), etc - that have been included in the most recent release, and you wonder how you ever kept your color palette organized before.

Less has prevented me from wanting to claw my eyes out during a recent round of frontend work - just for that, I'm incredibly grateful.

At the bottom of the Product Description, it has pagecount in parentheses (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004K1F9KG/ref=docs-os-doi_... says (34 pages))

I'm a fan of: http://blog.jolieodell.com/2010/09/07/women-in-tech/

It's lumped into Amazon.

An even larger list of more in-depth post-mortems: http://foundersblock.com/featured/25-best-startup-failure-po...

Max Levchin's married (and, judging by his Quora questions of late, also has a kid.) The lunch is purely professional.