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Deep, recent reads ranked by depth and freshness.

Honeycombremove filterMartin Fowlerremove filterDepth 4+remove filterClear all

  1. 01Martin Fowler · architecture

    When Software Meets Hardware

    A software engineering team modernizing a large-scale retail IoT system of 800,000 battery-powered sensors faced challenges integrating software practices with embedded hardware. By building physical sensor farms, virtual emulators, and self-diagnosing firmware, the team learned to design for intermittent connectivity, power efficiency, and fleet-level observability. The project succeeded by treating the physical world, hardware constraints, and engineering environments as core parts of the system lifecycle.

    DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read10 days ago

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  2. 02Honeycomb · architecture

    OpenTelemetry Collector Configuration for LLM Observability

    LLM applications emit bulky telemetry containing sensitive user content and disparate attribute names. The team uses an OpenTelemetry Collector pipeline to normalize, enrich, redact, and export this data to Honeycomb. This centralizes control, protects data before it leaves the network, and maintains consistent observability.

    DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read2 weeks ago

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  3. 03Martin Fowler · performance

    Are Harnesses Worth the Cost?

    An experiment was conducted to evaluate whether behavioral harnesses improve coding agent reliability when building a complex backend-for-frontend service. While frontier models succeeded consistently with or without a harness, the harness significantly increased token usage, time, and cost without improving final output. However, for a cost-optimized model, the harness improved success rates from 30 percent to 100 percent.

    DEPTH ■■■■■17 min read12 days ago

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  4. 04Honeycomb · practice

    How Honeycomb Private Cloud Drinks From the Fire Hose

    The Honeycomb Private Cloud team struggled to manually track and integrate rapid infrastructure and configuration changes produced by upstream teams. To solve this, they built custom scripts to generate automated drift reports and eventually integrated AI to help triage and track the necessary follow-up work. As a result, the team successfully scaled their integration process into a reliable daily workflow.

    DEPTH ■■■■■10 min read2 weeks ago

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