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. ...
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. ...
If you work at a company that runs its own Go module proxy and you connect through a VPN, you’ve probably seen this: 1 2 Get "https://binaries.example.com/google.golang.org/grpc/@v/v1.77.0.mod": dial tcp 172.27.5.36:443: i/o timeout The module has nothing to do with your company. It’s a public dependency. Yet Go refuses to fetch it from the public proxy and just dies with a timeout. The frustrating part: you know proxy.golang.org has the module, and your config lists it as a fallback. So why doesn’t it fall through? ...
Zero-touch observability for Go is finally becoming real. In this talk, we walk through the different strategies you can use to instrument Go applications without changing a single line of code, and what they cost you in terms of overhead, stability, and security. We compare several concrete approaches and projects: eBPF-based auto-instrumentation using OpenTelemetry’s Go auto-instrumentation agent and OBI (OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation), compile-time manipulation using tools like Orchestrion and the OpenTelemetry Compile-Time Instrumentation SIG, runtime injection via Frida/ptrace, and USDT (User Statically-Defined Tracing) probes — both via libstapsdt and a custom Go runtime fork. ...
The -toolexec flag hides a super-power in the Go toolchain: it lets you turn every go build into a programmable pipeline. In this session we’ll reveal how a simple wrapper command can inject custom analysis, code generation, and instrumentation—without changing a line of application code. You’ll see how platform and tooling teams use -toolexec to weave organisation-wide practices directly into the build, from enforcing error-handling standards to automatically adding observability hooks. We’ll map the journey from a “hello-world” wrapper to full Aspect-Oriented compile-time transformations, and discuss the trade-offs that come with this new power. ...