2025 Year in Review: Community, Contribution, and Changes

As we ease into the last few days of 2025, I like to close out this one last task: reflecting back on all the fun, challenges, and travel over the past year. While it takes a bit of research to gather all the facts and figures, it’s a rewarding effort. I’ve been sharing on this site for two decades now—no ads, no ulterior motives—just an honest effort to communicate with the world.

This year, the focus for me and my teams remained on the four pillars of our role: speaking, publishing, socializing, and hands-on content generation. 

While 2024 was about observability (o11y) taking center stage, 2025 was the year we put those theories into practice, accelerated our momentum, and stated to gain serious traction in the wild. 

Read on to find out more!

This was my third full year working for Chronosphere, an observability vendor that has really started to blossom. I remember when I started here, nobody knew who we were. Now it's a common occurrence to run into existing customers and to hear people say, "Chronosphere, I've heard of that!"

Travel and Events

Travel and speaking at events around the world is a major focus of what I do. I'm teaching, sharing, and freely contributing to both open source projects and to the general public knowledge around observability technologies. 

As you can see in the attached figure, I had 17 trips to 36 cities and 8 countries with the following destinations:

• Portland, OR
• Salt Lake City, UT
• Spain
• Las Vegas, NV
• London, UK (2
• Glasgow, Scotland
• Boston, MA
• New York City, NY
• Washington DC
• Raleigh, NC
• Oklahoma City, OK
• Manchester, UK
• Dublin, Ireland
• Atlanta, GA

Some of the events:

• SREDay London
• Devoxx UK
• Cloud Native Rejekts EU
• KubeCon EU
• Cloud Native Los Angeles
• Tech Meetup Glasgow
• Cloud Native London
• Red Hat Summit NA
• SRECon EU
• All Things Open
• Cloud Native Rejects NA
• KubeCon NA

If 2024 was about strategic travel, 2025 was about being where the community is. The travel schedule was relentless but incredibly rewarding. From London to Atlanta, the message remained clear: observability is the backbone of modern operations.

Publishing

I’ve continued to preach the open-source gospel as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Ambassador. My team spent 2025 bridging the gap between metrics, events, traces, logs, and dashboards.

This year my blog turned 20 years in production! The reach of our content in 2025 exceeded all expectations. Sharing knowledge is only half the battle; ensuring it reaches the right people is the other half. This year, my blog surpassed 900,000 views, a testament to the community's growing hunger for cloud-native and observability insights.  

I topped out in Oct - Nov at 205k views. At the time of this writing it's around 4.7 million views and I'm happy to see that it has such value for so many visitors as that's always been the goal. 

This blog offers free content (see the license at the footer of this blog) and without any advertising. It's about learning and not about earning. I've published 37 articles here this year on a large range of topics, but mostly focused on cloud native observability.  I've also continued to find syndication with DZone, posting 16 articles in featured posts.

Workshops and hands-on content

This was the Year of the Workshop. We focused heavily on Fluent Bit telemetry pipelines, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Perses visualization. 

I personally shifted my focus from Perses to Fluent Bit and have since become a maintainer. I'm working extensively on the docs project, some on the website, and have even managed to start contributing code to the main Fluent Bit project. Good to be back hands on with open source projects, where I have my roots.

This was the year I also started working with AI in my coding, using vibe coding as it's known. This has been a fun journey and it definitely has accelerated both my coding and my production. It has not gone on without a few bumps in the road, but that's the fun of learning new things!

The Fairway Journey

While the tech world moved fast, I made sure my time on the grass kept pace. 2025 was the first full year of focus for my golf game. I logged an incredible 123 rounds, taking my clubs to Spain, Florida, North Carolina, and Oregon. All that practice paid off—I started the year at a 9.4, but I’m closing out 2025 with my handicap down to a 5.6. 

The goal is not for me to get to scratch, I just enjoy a nice time and want to hit the ball rather regularly where I aim it. This is the realization that life is moving along and that I'm not going upwards in any sports I choose to play, but slowly declining. 

It's a natural evolution and I think golf is the one game I can play for a very, very long time and the enjoyment will not diminish no matter the handicap. 

What's next?

Finally, the year wrapped up with some major news!

I do not know how this will change work and my 2026 plans, but I'm very excited for this next chapter. I am looking forward to helping scale Chronosphere's reach next year.

Thanks for the Journey

This journey would be nothing without our readers, listeners, watchers, and those providing feedback. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’m already looking forward to 2026 and the new challenges it will bring.

Happy holidays and end of the year to you and your families as you transition into 2026, I'm looking forward to seeing you all online and in person next year!