Liz
Fong-Jones

Making Systems
Tell the Truth

The technical work is not separable from the advocacy work in Liz's career. Both operate on the same principle: the system you have is producing outputs, and your job is to understand those outputs honestly enough to change what needs to change.

At Honeycomb, she has been one of the key voices arguing for high-cardinality, event-based telemetry as the foundation of genuine observability - as opposed to metrics aggregation, which throws away the context you need exactly when production is exploding. The argument is rigorous and she makes it in every forum available: conference keynotes, GitHub threads, podcasts, and the book that now sits on the shelf of most serious SRE teams.

She also does infrastructure work. She led the migration of 92% of Honeycomb's compute workloads to arm64 architecture - specifically AWS Graviton2 and Graviton3 processors - reducing compute costs by 40%. That's not a slide-deck achievement. That's engineering at a scale that has real budget implications, and it earned her a seat in the AWS Community Heroes program.

Her connection to OpenTelemetry - the open-source observability framework that is fast becoming the industry standard for distributed tracing, metrics, and logs - runs through governance. She sits on the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee, which means she's not just advocating for the standard; she's helping shape how it evolves. For a standard that hundreds of thousands of engineering teams are now depending on, that's significant work.

Apply the "Marie Kondo principle" to your alerts, she has suggested: ask whether each one brings you joy. The ones that don't? Those are the ones that fire at 3 AM for things that don't need a human response. The discipline of alert management is just as much a part of production excellence as the discipline of instrumentation design.

The conference circuit has consumed a substantial portion of her professional calendar - and she's one of the few people who can hold a room's attention while explaining distributed tracing. SREcon, QCon, LeadDev, PlatformCon, GOTO, YOW! - she appears at all of them, consistently. The topics shift with the industry: one quarter it's OpenTelemetry implementation, the next it's reproducible builds with Docker Bake, the next it's platform engineering from theory to practice.

In March 2026, she spoke at QCon London. In November 2026, she's scheduled for LeadDev. This is the pace of someone who genuinely believes that knowledge transfer matters, that the gap between the people who know how to build reliable systems and the organizations that need to build them is a problem worth closing in person.

What She's
Actually Building

The through-line in Liz Fong-Jones's career is not a technical specialty or an industry vertical. It's a commitment to making systems honest - whether those systems are distributed software architectures that need better observability, or corporate institutions that need better accountability, or legal regimes that have never been forced to reckon with online harassment until someone actually sued.

She left one of the world's most lucrative careers because she'd decided the cost-benefit analysis didn't add up. She seeded a labor fund with her own money because that was the most direct way to do the thing. She filed a defamation lawsuit against a site that had been weaponizing the internet against trans people for years - and she won.

The aspiration she articulates is to advance production excellence through observability while building a more equitable tech industry - one where workers have meaningful power, marginalized people can thrive, and systems are built to serve everyone. That's an abstract statement. Her career is the concrete version of it: every conference talk, every governance committee meeting, every legal brief is an installment in the same argument.

She is not waiting for permission to make that argument. She has never waited. That's what makes her worth paying attention to.