2025 End Of Year Checkpoint

To be honest I’m not really a fan of most holidays, but “new years” is something that I’ve always found to be a good demarcation point to reflect on the past year and set some goals for the next one. I enjoy having a list of things I’m working towards, and regularly just pausing to see where I’m at in my journey. Part of that involves having snapshots or checkpoints of where I’m at, and what I’m working on.

2025 was a pretty good year. I ramped up my contributions in open source, and was able to transition into a role where I can focus on OpenTelemetry full-time. In my previous role before switching jobs, I was able to deliver on some interesting work, and in general I learned a ton and worked with a lot of new people. LLMs are great and all, but there’s something special about working with other humans, and the collaboration and camaraderie that comes with it. I’m a bit concerned about the future of that aspect of this career… but we won’t go there right now.

Any ways, here are some things I’m working on right now as we close out 2025:

  • The Ecosystem explorer project was officially approved, and I’m working on planning out the work and roadmap for it.
  • The Java instrumentation metadata population is around 65% complete, hoping to wrap this up by the end of January.
    • Declarative configuration for the Java agent is making a lot of progress, and I’m investigating how to incorporate the new configurations into the metadata files.
  • Working on automation for the OpenTelemetry Collector documentation.
    • Has been working nicely the past few releases, need to move it upstream now.
  • Building automation for publishing documentation associated with the OpenTelemetry configuration project.
  • Rewriting the extensions documentation for the OpenTelemetry Java agent.
  • Wrapping up a Prometheus java client contribution that allows support for multiple metrics with the same name but different labels.
  • Investigating a potential memory leak in the Prometheus java client HTTP server.
    • Using this as an exercise to play with pyroscope and some other profiling tools.
  • Researching and learning more about the Java aspects of the OBI/Beyla project, and where I can contribute.
  • Breaking ground on building a home lab environment where I can more easily run experiments and benchmark workloads, and get some more practice with Kubernetes.

Maybe in 2026 I can do a better job of focusing on fewer things at once, but joining Grafana has been like being a kid thrown in a candy shop, and everything is just so interesting to me.

I’m also trying to finish up another “ten years in” blog post, but progress has been slow. Hopefully I can wrap that up soon though.

Some of the main highlights of the past year:

  • At the beginning of the year I embedded into a different team at Toast for a quarter where I did a deep dive into some new technologies and helped implement OpenSearch into a system.
  • Before leaving Toast I was able to deliver a backstage plugin that would analyze and suggest infrastructure tuning for services based on telemetry data and a custom algorithm I developed.
  • Helped my teammate Adam build out an AI SRE slack assistant that was actually really useful.
  • Joined Grafana Labs to work on OpenTelemetry full-time. This has been a dream come true for me, and something I was actively working towards for several years.
  • Introduced the metadata system to the OpenTelemetry Java instrumentation project, and got buy in and support from the maintainers.
  • Created the Ecosystem explorer POC and got approval to move forward with it as an official OpenTelemetry project.
  • Made my first contributions to the Prometheus Java client, and started learning that codebase and attending community calls.
  • Became an approver for the OpenTelemetry Java Contrib project, as well as the opentelemetry.io documentation site.
  • Co-authored an official OpenTelemetry blog post with my teammates at Grafana.
  • Actually published some blog posts on this site!

I get excited thinking about how much I am going to learn and grow this year. I am surrounded by so many amazing people in the observability space right now, both within Grafana and also the greater OpenTelemetry community, and there is so much interesting work happening. I wake up every day excited about what I’m doing.

Lastly, I’m pretty proud of my github wrapped results for 2025, now that github is basically my main work tool it has a little bit more meaning.

2025 Github wrapped