Jamie Danielson

Role/Company : Software Engineer, Telemetry Team, Honeycomb

Jamie is a Telemetry Engineer at Honeycomb where she works on instrumentation libraries. She is an active contributor to multiple OpenTelemetry projects, and is an approver for OpenTelemetry JavaScript. When she’s not working she’s playing dek hockey or whittling away the hours with jigsaw puzzles.

Session Title : Just because you didn’t think of it doesn’t make it an edge case

Description   :

Even when you think you’re designing for and testing for all use cases, there will be scenarios you haven’t thought of. These are not always “edge” cases – they are simply blind spots or unexpected use cases. Put another way, these are the unknown unknowns. By their very definition you cannot account for them, but you can plan for them by having safeguards in place that allow you to quickly iterate on production code to handle the inevitable impact caused by unknown unknowns.

We have experienced this plenty of times at Honeycomb as customers send us new variations of telemetry and use our product in ways we hadn’t thought of. A prime example of this occurred when we enabled a new type of ingest that seemed relatively straightforward. We added a feature flag for this functionality, though it seemed excessive and unnecessary – it was just extra code to maintain for a fairly trivial new feature. This feature flag ended up saving our bacon when an unexpected shape of data almost took down production.