# Liz Fong-Jones

> Liz Fong-Jones is a Technical Fellow at Honeycomb.io, renowned SRE practitioner, co-author of 'Observability Engineering' (O'Reilly), and one of the most influential voices in the observability and platform engineering space. With 18+ years in software engineering spanning Google (11 years) and Honeycomb, she bridges deep technical expertise with fierce advocacy for labor rights, trans inclusion, and workplace equity. She led the Google Walkout Strike Fund in 2018, founded the Solidarity Fund by Coworker, and sits on the OpenTelemetry governance committee - all while speaking at every major SRE and DevOps conference on Earth.

- **Role:** Technical Fellow at Honeycomb.io
- **Organizations:** Honeycomb.io, OpenTelemetry Governance Committee, The Solidarity Fund by Coworker (Board President), USENIX SREcon Global Steering Committee, AWS Community Heroes
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** Attended (did not complete due to financial constraints), California Institute of Technology (Caltech), B.S. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (4.9/5.0 GPA), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- **Known for:** Co-authored 'Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence' (O'Reilly, 2022) - considered a seminal work in the field, Created the Google Walkout Strike Fund in 2018 - matched $100,000 pledge within hours, reached $250,000 within days, Founded The Solidarity Fund by Coworker, supporting 44+ organizing tech workers

## Career timeline

- **2008** — Joined Google as Systems Administrator, Mountain View, CA
- **2010** — Began internal organizing at Google around equity engineering and accessibility
- **2011** — Helped negotiate real-name policy change for Google+
- **2014** — Completed B.S. at MIT while working at Google
- **2016** — Contributed to the Never Again pledge codebase; co-chaired SREcon16
- **2018** — Created the Google Strike Fund ($250,000 raised within days); participated in the Google Walkout for Real Change (Nov 1)
- **2019** — Resigned from Google to 'create a more just world'; joined Honeycomb as first Developer Advocate (February)
- **2020** — Founded the Solidarity Fund by Coworker, seeded with ~$100,000 from exit stock grant
- **2022** — Co-authored 'Observability Engineering' with Charity Majors and George Miranda (O'Reilly); became AWS Community Hero; Solidarity Fund won Fast Company's World Changing Ideas Award
- **2023** — Won $445,000 AUD defamation judgment against Kiwi Farms-associated company; advanced to Field CTO then Technical Fellow at Honeycomb
- **2025** — Active Technical Fellow at Honeycomb; speaking at YOW! Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, PlatformCon, QCon London
- **2026** — Speaking at QCon London (March) and LeadDev (November); ongoing litigation with Lolcow LLC/Kiwi Farms

## Achievements

- Co-authored 'Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence' (O'Reilly, 2022) - considered a seminal work in the field
- Created the Google Walkout Strike Fund in 2018 - matched $100,000 pledge within hours, reached $250,000 within days
- Founded The Solidarity Fund by Coworker, supporting 44+ organizing tech workers
- Won Fast Company's World Changing Ideas Award (2022) for the Solidarity Fund
- Won $445,000 AUD defamation judgment against Kiwi Farms-associated harassers (2023)
- Served on OpenTelemetry Governance Committee - helping shape the industry standard
- AWS Community Hero designation for Graviton, Observability, and Lambda expertise
- Led migration of 92% of Honeycomb's compute workloads to arm64, reducing costs by 40%
- USENIX SREcon Global Steering Committee Member and Program Co-Chair
- Negotiated real-name policy change for Google+ as an internal advocate (2011)

## Latest updates

- **2026-03** — Spoke at QCon London 2026 (March 16-18)
- **2026-03** — Lolcow LLC (Kiwi Farms operator) filed counter-lawsuit related to DMCA subpoena disputes
- **2025-12** — Spoke at YOW! Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane conferences
- **2025-05** — Spoke at PlatformCon 2025 on platform engineering
- **2025-04** — Presented at USENIX SREcon 25 EMEA on reproducible builds with Docker Bake
- **2025-02** — Commented publicly on removal of LGBTQ+ federal workers from peer support groups

## Links

- Website: https://lizthegrey.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/efong/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lizthegrey
- GitHub: https://github.com/lizthegrey

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/liz-fong-jones
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-04-21