Go

The debugging loop is slow. You cannot reproduce the bug locally, so you add a log line and redeploy. Wrong place. You do it again. An agent alone does not fix this: it still has to pick a mechanism, and it has to know what that mechanism costs. This talk is about three open-source approaches that take the rebuild out of that loop. Each acts at a different point in the software lifecycle, and each inherits the strengths and constraints of its intervention point. ...

Jonathan Hall and Shay Nehmad had me on Cup o’ Go for episode 167, straight after their GopherCon US recap. We spent about forty minutes on instrumentation: what an APM tool is actually measuring, and the three ways you can get telemetry out of a Go program without asking every team to rewrite their handlers. The part I enjoyed arguing about most was blast radius. Manual instrumentation is precise and tedious, and it never finishes. eBPF buys you one agent covering every language on the box, at the cost of running code in the kernel, where a bad program can take the whole host down with it. Compile-time instrumentation rewrites the syntax tree behind go build through the -toolexec hook, which keeps failures scoped to one service and works anywhere Go compiles. People love this dark magic, which I find either reassuring or alarming depending on the day. ...

Note This post was originally published on the OpenTelemetry blog on 2026-07-16. I wrote it for the OpenTelemetry community; this is a mirror on my personal blog with some added commentary. Why this milestone matters to me I have been involved with the Go Compile-Time Instrumentation SIG since it kicked off at the start of 2025, when Alibaba and Datadog decided to pool their efforts into a single vendor-neutral project. Watching it reach v1 last week felt genuinely satisfying — not because “v1” is a magic number, but because it marks the point where we stopped calling it experimental and started calling it something people should actually run in their builds. ...

The first post in this thread was about why I keep saying yes to mentorship. The second was the playbook for mentees. This one is for the people on the other side of the table: the maintainers, the SIG leads, the engineers in companies that depend on a project and are starting to wonder whether dependency is enough. The frame I’m borrowing comes from a piece my colleagues at Bloomberg published with the CNCF in March: Sustaining OpenTelemetry: Moving from Dependency Management to Stewardship (also on Bloomberg’s company stories). The phrase has stuck with me. It names something I’ve been trying to articulate for years, and gives me a concrete vocabulary for talking about what mentorship is for inside a project the size of OpenTelemetry. ...

This post expands on the FOSDEM 2026 Go Devroom talk I co-presented with Hannah S. Kim. The talk, demo code, and all benchmark scenarios are available in the fosdem-2026 repository. The Problem Go is one of the best languages for building production backend services. It compiles to native binaries, has excellent concurrency primitives, and produces predictable performance characteristics. But when it comes to auto-instrumentation — adding observability without modifying source code — Go is uniquely difficult. ...