Reflection

There’s a moment that keeps happening to me. Someone I mentored two or three years ago shows up in a SIG call, on a maintainers’ list, on a stage at KubeCon. They’ve shipped something I couldn’t have shipped alone. They’re answering questions I once answered for them. And the part that gets me: they’re already mentoring someone else. That moment is the thing. why why It’s also the only honest answer to “why do you keep doing this when it’s not your job?” The loop closes, and you get to watch. ↩ Everything else I write here is a footnote to that moment. ...

Every now and then a project surprises you by remembering something you said years ago. This week was one of those weeks. A talk I gave at PromCon Online 2020 — The Zen of Prometheus — has quietly become part of the official Prometheus documentation. I am still sitting with it. Where it started The talk was born in the strangest year of my career. PromCon 2020 was online, like everything else. I was a few years deep into running Prometheus in anger, collecting scars from instrumenting services that didn’t want to be instrumented and writing alerts that kept me up at night for the wrong reasons. I wanted a way to package those lessons that wasn’t another forty-slide deck of bullet points. ...

Startups can be exciting arenas of innovation, filled with ambitious goals, rapid development cycles, and the allure of shaping the future. But when the pace becomes unsustainable, and personal values clash with company culture, the dream can quickly lose its luster. My recent experience at a machine learning inference startup taught me invaluable lessons about overwork, alignment, and the balance between idealism and pragmatism. Why I Decided to Leave The decision to leave wasn’t easy, but it became necessary when I realized that the environment was not compatible with my personal and professional priorities. ...

A new chapter in my professional journey As the flowers bloom and the world awakens to the bright colors of spring, a season of renewal and growth, I find myself making a significant transition in my professional journey. (Too cheesy? I know, but bear with me.) This year, I find myself absent from the familiar buzz of KubeCon, a place of learning and connection that I hold dear. Instead, I’m on a different kind of duty — one that involves embracing new roles and responsibilities in life. ...