>>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 Cub alumni, Danielle GShock ISV PSA director at AWS joins us 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, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and 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 switched 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 to 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 coding 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 Young, who's our other founder. And then Liz Frank Jones, who's our, 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. You two leaders, you mentioned that you liked the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females and the leadership position. Talk 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 over index on that because there was this maybe fear or rareness of it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. But I'm seeing that rhetoric shift 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 me moving into management, I think were both ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you here, 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 we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguards, slack. Hello, fresh. Just to name a couple. If you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to 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 gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are 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, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You could do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. I said, kind of rich data, contextual data. We refer it as having high ity and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query this data and we 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 under 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 paged 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 realtime visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, Danielle, wanna 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, 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 very important partner in the observa observability market that we have >>You back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. I know that 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 is 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 Orthodox 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 the 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 tele, telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb and it land was win-win >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in. Let's talk about how honeycomb supports D and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach? Yeah, >>Yeah, absolutely. So I, I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. But again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are 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 after tech hu Latinas in tech 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 we'll lead to more diverse hires in the long term. >>That's a great focus there. Danielle, 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 D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, 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 Vera 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. I write 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, 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. So >>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, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI headstart program, 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 pre-load 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 wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tech, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, 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 nineties during the, the first.com bubble and have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, 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, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teens at AWS since 2015. So it's really been a great ride. And like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change 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 or 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 join, 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 lead, >>Take the lead, love it there. Same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for 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, 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 are a more senior IC or in a 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 is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed. There's a million other people in the room that probably has the, have the same question. And because of imposter syndrome, don't wanna 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, ask a question, ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and AWS, what you're doing together from a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D 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 check.

>>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 Cub alumni, Danielle GShock ISV PSA director a at AWS joins us 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, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and 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 switched 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 to 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 coding 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 yen, who our other founder, and then Liz Frank Jones, who 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. You're two leaders. You mentioned that you like the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females in the leadership position. Talk 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 over index on that because there was this maybe fear or rareness of it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. But I'm seeing that rhetoric shift 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 me moving into management, I think were both ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you here, 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 we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguard, slack. Hello, fresh. Just to name a couple. If you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to 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 gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are 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, what, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest 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 it as having high ity and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query this data and we 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 comb 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 under 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 paged 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. Danielle, Danielle, wanna 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, 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 very important partner in the observa observability market that we have. >>Vera a back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. I Don know that this Predates me to some extent, but I Don 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 also 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 the 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 tele telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb and demand was win-win >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in. Let's talk about how honeycomb supports D E and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach Vera? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. But again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are 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 end, 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 Africa, tech hu Latinas in tech 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. Danielle, 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 D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, 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 Vera 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. I write 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, 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. So >>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, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI head start program, 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 pre-load 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 wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tech, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, 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 nineties during the, the first.com bubble and have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, 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, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teen at AWS since 2015. So it's really been a great ride. And like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change 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 join, 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 lead, >>Take the lead. Love that various same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for 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 bit, 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 are a more senior IC or in a 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 is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed. There's a million outta people in the room that probably has the, have the same question and because an imposter syndrome don't wanna 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 a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D E and I, we appreciate your insights. >>Thank you so much for having us talking to >>My pleasure. Likewise, for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase women in.