This is the second post in our series about Lattice, Honeycomb’s new design system and how we’re applying a user-centric design philosophy to our product. Lattice begin! At Honeycomb, we understand that our users are often under a great deal of pressure when troubleshooting complicated issues in their applications.
Slack experienced meteoric growth between 2017 and 2020—but that level of growth came with growing pains. In his talk at the 2021 o11ycon+hnycon, Frank Chen (LinkedIn), a Slack Senior Staff Engineer, detailed one of Slack’s biggest pain points in that period: flaky tests. A flaky test returns both a passing and failing result despite no changes in the code. At one point, between 2017 and 2020, Slack’s flaky test rate reached as high as 50%.
Modern software services are expected to be highly available, and running a service with minimal interruptions requires a certain amount of reliability-focused engineering work. At the same time, teams also need to build new features and improve existing ones, so that users are delighted and don’t churn.
You might have noticed some visual changes happening in Honeycomb lately. Colors, typography, icons, and some features have started to look a bit different. While these changes are just beginning to make their way into the product, we’ve been working on them for some time. Let’s look at what has been going on behind the scenes to make them happen.
