Ben Curtis, co-founder of Honeybadger, shares his journey from early web development and Rails adoption to building a bootstrapped error monitoring and observability platform over 14 years. He discusses the genesis of Honeybadger as a reaction to poor customer service from Airbrake, the decision to stay bootstrapped and avoid VC funding, and the technical evolution of the product including a custom query language (BadgerQL) and structured logging. Ben also introduces Breakwater, a new side project aimed at making it easy for software vendors to distribute and monetize Docker images with license-based access control. He offers advice for indie hackers around patience, personal motivation, and not underestimating marketing, and explains Honeybadger's 30-hour work week philosophy.
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