AI agents removed the friction from writing telemetry
I used to avoid adding telemetry because it felt like tedious busywork. Now with Claude handling the OpenTelemetry boilerplate, I'm instrumenting everything.
I'm excited to share that after 3.5 years at Amplitude I'm joining Honeycomb in a little over a week. I'm joining Honeycomb for a slew of reasons. I'll share just a few:
While I joined Amplitude to specifically work on the design systems team, my role shifted to include frontend infrastructure as well. I learned from a number of fantastic collaborators, especially Jack McCloy, Ryan Kahn, Meredith Fay, and Jimmy Wilson. I also worked hard to grow my skills in various frontend infrastructure areas, including web performance, CI/CD, deployments, test infrastructure, and monorepo management.
The upside to being in an intense learning period at work is that I can look back on my time at Amplitude and be proud of what I accomplished.
The downside is that I was left with no time to write posts for this blog! I'm looking forward to retroactively sharing learnings from my time at Amplitude, as well as topics I learn about while at Honeycomb.
To hold myself accountable, I wanted to share the topics that I'm considering writing about, and to hear from you about which ones sound most interesting.
Please let me know if any of these topics resonate with you. While I love writing this newsletter as a way to get my thoughts in order, I'm really writing it for you, my reader.
I'm so looking forward to joining the team at Honeycomb. I can't wait to dive in and start learning new things from everyone that I collaborate with.
For now, I hope everyone has a restful weekend. Take care of yourselves.
I used to avoid adding telemetry because it felt like tedious busywork. Now with Claude handling the OpenTelemetry boilerplate, I'm instrumenting everything.
AI agents work better when given appropriate context and guardrails.
I've been using Claude Code to offload tedious parts of platform engineering: dependency reviews, generating test PRs, dependency migrations, and project cleanup.