 Hey everyone, welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one episode three women in tech. I'm your host Lisa Martin I've got two female rock stars joining me next Vera Reynolds is here engineering manager Telemetry at honeycomb and one of our cuba alumni Danielle Greg shock ISV PSA director eight at AWS Dwayne says as well ladies. It's great to have you talking about a very important topic today Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having me appreciate it Of course there. Let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background in tech You're coming up on your 10th anniversary happy anniversary. Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years But yeah, I started in tech in 2012. I was an engineer for most of that time and just recently as of March switch to engineering management here at honeycomb and You know throughout my career. I was very much interested in all the things right and it was a big FOMO As far as trying a few different Companies and products and I've done things from web development mobile to platforms It would be apt to call me a generalist And in the more recent years, I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space and for me That came in the form of cloud foundry circle CI and now honeycomb I actually had my eye on honeycomb for a while before joining I came across a blog post by charity majors who's one of our founders and she was actually talking about management And how to pursue that and whether or not it's right for your career And so I was like who is this person? I really like her found the company They were pretty small at the time So I was sort of keeping my eye on them and then when the time came around for me to look again I did a little bit more digging found a lot of talks about the product and On the one hand, they really spoke to me as the solution they talked about Developers owning their code in production and answering questions about what is happening What are your users seeing and I felt that pain? I got what they were trying to do And also on the other hand every talk I saw at the time was from an amazing woman Which I haven't seen before so I came across charity majors again Christine Yan who's our other founder and then Liz Frank Jones who's our principal developer advocate and that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here Yeah, honeycomb is interesting. This is a Female founded company your two leaders you mentioned that you like the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw Females and the leadership position talks to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at honeycomb Yeah, you know historically we have tried not to overindex on that because there was this maybe fear or rariness of It taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization from our success as a company but I'm seeing that rhetoric shifts Recently because we believe that with great responsibility with great power comes great responsibility And we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company So I would say that for me it was a choice between a few offers Right and that was a selling point for sure because again I've never experienced it and I've really seen how much they walk that walk Even me being here and the moving into management. I think we're both Ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me And so I think it's been a great ride Excellent sounds like it before we bring Danielle and to talk about the partnership I do want to have you there talk to the audience a little bit about honeycomb what technology it's delivering and What are its differentiators? Yeah, absolutely so honeycomb is an observability tool that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production and and We work with a number of various customers. Some of them are vanguards lack. Hello, fresh just to name a couple If you're not familiar with observability tooling It's akin to a traditional application performance monitoring but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because APM tools were built at the time of Monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today where Things can go wrong anywhere in that chain and you can't predict what you're going to need to ask ahead of time so Some of the ways that we're different is our ability to store and query really rich data Which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. What I mean by rich data is Something that has a lot of attributes. So for example when an error happens knowing who it happened to which user ID which I don't know region they were in what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system and our Injust engine is really fast. You can do it in as little as three seconds and We call data like this. I said kind of rich data contextual data We refer to this having high carnality and high dimensionality Which are big words, but at the other day what that means is we can store and we can query the same and can do it really fast and To give you an example of how that looks for our customers Let's say you have a developer team who are using honeycomb to understand and observe their system And they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong they can go into honeycomb and Figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app And they operated their app last week that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out On your data that allows you to understand what's happening Especially when you have an incident going on right or your really important high-profile customer is telling you that something's wrong And we can do that even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay. You're not actually getting page on it But your customers are telling you that something's wrong and we believe that's where we shine in helping you there Excellent, it sounds like that's where you really shine that real-time visibility is so critical these days Daniela want to bring you into the conversation talk to us a little bit about the honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens Yeah, so excuse me observability is obviously a very important segment in the cloud space a very important to AWS Because a lot of all of our customers as they build their systems distributed They need to be able to see where where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building And so honeycomb is a is an advanced technology partner They've been working with us for quite some time and they have a Their solution is listed on the marketplace Definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers and they have many integrations Which you know, we've seen is key to success Being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform And I know that they've done some some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS Things in that area as well. And so a very important partner in the observable observability market that we have You're back to you Let's kind of unpack the partnership of significance That honeycomb is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal SAWS Yeah, absolutely I know this predates me to some extent, but I know for a long time AWS and honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together and I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends There's kind of two ways of looking at it on the one side. There is our own infrastructure so honeycomb runs on AWS And actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses lambda And it does so in a pretty unorthodox way. So we've had a long standing conversation with the AWS team as far as Drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use this technology in a way that works for us And hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well That also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available And then that way we can be sort of the guinea pigs and try things out In a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance But also allows again other customers of AWS to follow in that path And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both honeycomb users and AWS users because it's As you imagine quite a big overlap And there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data From AWS to honeycomb. So for example Last year we built a tool Based on the new lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in lambdas To get that telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb and it's named with win Excellent. So i'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective. You're sticking with you and then daniel will bring you in Let's talk about how honeycomb supports de and i across its organization. And how was that synergistic with AWS's approach. Yeah Yeah, absolutely. So I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to overindex on the win and let aspect of ourselves Again, a lot of things are shifting. We're growing a lot And so we're recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives and we also Notice that we can do better and we should do better And to that and we're doing a few things differently That are pretty recent initiatives We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech Some examples would be afro tech hue Latina's intact among a number of others And another initiative is dei head start. That's something that is an internal Practice that we started that includes Reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for honeycomb becomes live So before we posted to linkedin before it's even live on our job speech And the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is Will lead to more diverse hires in the long term That's a great focus there daniel. I know we've talked about this before but for the audience In terms of the context of the honeycomb partnership the focus at aws for de and i Is really significant unpack that a little bit for us Let me just bring it back to just how we think about it With the companies that we work with but also in in Terms of you know what we want to be able to do Excuse me. It's very important for us to you know build products that reflect The customers that we have and I think you know working with a company like honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space By by bringing in you know the experiences of many different types of people I genuinely believe and i'm sure vira also believes that by having those diverse perspectives That we're able to then build better products for our customers And you know, it's one of one of our leadership principles Is is rooted in this our right a lot it asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives And you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background So I think that is where our de and i um, you know, I thought process is rooted And you know companies like honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them To do what they need to do in their unique environments is super important The the importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough It's something that is can be pivotal to organizations and It's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies Bear I want to go back to you for a second. I think you mentioned this the dei head start for them That's an internal program at honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? Yeah, that's right And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team So i'm learning a lot of these things firsthand And how it works is we try to make sure to preload our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have With diverse candidates to the best of our abilities and that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned Or reaching out to our internal network And make sure that we give those applicants a head start so to speak Excellent I like that Danielle before we close I want to get a little bit of your background. We've got various background in tech She's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a Short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate being able to share this So I started as a software engineer back actually in the late 90s during the the first dot com bubble and Have have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor um probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined aws as a customer facing solutions architect I do think spending a lot of time hands-on definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome Issues that folks suffer from not to say I don't at all, but it certainly helped with that and I've been leading teams at aws since 2015 So it's really been a great ride. Um, and like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams Change uh as far as their composition and I'm I'm grateful to be part of it It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better Last question for each of you and we're almost out of time and Danielle I'm gonna stick with you What's your advice your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech? Or those who may be in tech. Maybe they're in individual contributor positions And they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? I mean definitely for the individual contributors tech tech is a great career Direction And you will always be able to find women like you you have to maybe just work a little bit harder to joy have community In that but then as a leader Representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my you just have to take the leap Take the lead love that beer same question for you What's your advice and recommendations for those? Maybe future female leaders in tech Yeah, absolutely. Um, uh Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome And I think if we all struggle with it from time to time no matter how many years it's been and I think for Me from me the advice would be if you're starting out don't be afraid to ask Questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a little a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there and I think it's on all of us to Remember what it's like to not know how things work and on the flip side of that if you're a more senior I see or in the leadership role Also being able to model just saying I don't know how this works And going and figuring out answers together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career It's just to feel like I can Say that I don't know something I totally agree a bit in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed there's a million out of people in the room that probably has to have the same question and because of imposter syndrome Don't want to admit. I don't understand that can we back up? But I agree with you. I think that is One of the best things raise your hand and ask a question ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and aws What you're doing together from my technology perspective and the focused efforts that each company has on de and I We appreciate your insights Thank you so much for having us Great talking to you my pleasure. Likewise for my guests. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the aws partner showcase women in tech