Go

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. ...

Brussels Again, But Make It Unplugged The day after FOSDEM, about a hundred of us gathered at Sparks Meeting on Rue Ravenstein in Brussels for OTel Unplugged EU 2026 — an unconference dedicated entirely to OpenTelemetry. Purple stage lights, a mid-century auditorium with wood paneling, and the familiar buzz of people who spend their days thinking about telemetry pipelines. If you know, you know. The format is simple: no prepared talks, no slides. Morning session brainstorming, dot-voting on topics, then self-organizing into nine rooms across four breakout slots. You vote with your feet. If a conversation isn’t working, you move. It’s chaotic, it’s honest, and it produces the kind of discussions that polished conference talks rarely achieve. ...

Another Year, Another FOSDEM FOSDEM — the annual Brussels pilgrimage. If you’ve been, you know the drill: too many talks, too little time, questionable coffee, and the kind of conversations that only happen when you pack thousands of open-source developers into a university campus in the dead of winter. This year was different for me, though. Two talks in two devrooms, three sessions at OTel Unplugged — and this time, I brought the whole family. My wife and our toddler (who has graduated from “can barely walk” to “can absolutely destroy a hotel room in under four minutes”) came along, and we turned it into a proper trip — FOSDEM, then a few days exploring Ghent and Antwerp before heading home. ...