A New Chapter: Joining SUSE as Technical Advocacy Lead

There are moments in your career where the path forward becomes surprisingly clear. After years of building, shipping, and advocating in the open source and cloud native ecosystem, I find myself at one of those moments. 

Today I'm excited to share that I've joined SUSE as Technical Advocacy Lead — and I couldn't be more energized about what lies ahead.

Let me back up a bit, because getting here is a story worth telling.

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!

Devoxx UK 2025: Meet the New Kid in the Sandbox - Integrating Visualization with Prometheus (slides + recording)

Today, as previously posted, I was on stage at Devoxx UK in London. 

Over the years I've spoken at the Belgian and UK versions of Devoxx events. I've shared on topics covering application development, developer productivity, cloud development, and architecture. 

My last appearance was at Devoxx UK in 2022, so it was really fun to be back again in London with a topic near to my heart. I shared some good basic insights into Perses, a CNCF Sandbox level visualization and dashboard project.

This session is a lot of fun to explore and includes access to a free online project sandbox where you can play with the tooling. Not only that, you can make use of the free online workshop where you build everything hands-on from scratch and learn about the Perses dashboard and visualization experience.

Below I'll share my slides and recording.

Cloud Native Los Angeles: Observability-as-a-Service (slides)

As mentioned previously, Graziano Casto and I presented an online session for the Cloud Native Los Angeles meetup. We shared our thoughts on the subject of Observability-as-a-Service as related to when Platform Engineering and SRE teams work together. 

The CNCF's Los Angeles (LA) community group represents the LA cloud native community and aims to promote and champion CNCF and open source technology as well as help network and collaborate. To that end, we are contributing whole heartedly!

By combining our personal experiences and expertise in Platform Engineering and Cloud Native Observability, we think this session provides good insights into how one can leverage the two disciplines to better our developer team's experiences.

We had a small live audience, but the talk was recorded, so I'm sharing our slide deck, the talk abstract, and the recording when it's available.

Cloud Native Los Angeles: Observability-as-a-Service

On Friday, 11 April 2025 both Graziano Casto and I will be presenting an online session for the Cloud Native Los Angeles meetup, sharing our thoughts on the subject of Observability-as-a-Service. 

The CNCF's Los Angeles (LA) community group represents the LA cloud native community and aims to promote and champion CNCF and open source technology as well as help network and collaborate. To that end, we are contributing whole heartedly!

By combining our personal experiences and expertise in Platform Engineering and Cloud Native Observability, we think this session provides good insights into how one can leverage the two disciplines to better our developer team's experiences.

Join us on this journey.

SREDay London 2025: When Platform Engineers meet SREs (slides)

 Today as previously mentioned, with my co-presenter Graziano Casto, we've shared our story at SREday London.

This event is two days and focused on Site Reliability, DevOps, and Cloud with three tracks of talks. The venue will be the Everyman Canary Wharf, a rather hip location for this event and should be a lot of fun meeting with attendees and speakers.

This collaboration story is about bringing observability to the foundations of your developer experience, ensuring it's a first class citizen in the platforms you are engineering from day one while discovering that it's giving SREs their super powers.

Below you will find the slides, the abstract, and our thanks for attending this event. 

SREDay London 2025: When Platform Engineers meet SREs

I'm going to be at SREday London from 27-28 Mar 2025 with my co-presenter Graziano Casto, developer relations engineer at Mia-Platform sharing a platform engineering meets SRE story.

This event is two days and focused on Site Reliability, DevOps, and Cloud with three tracks of talks. The venue will be the Everyman Canary Wharf, a rather hip location for this event and should be a lot of fun meeting with attendees and speakers.

Graziano and I met a few years ago at Platmosphere and we've since been sharing topics of platform engineering and observability. This has led us to several events, including SREDay in Amsterdam last year and now London this year!

Below you will find the abstract for the story we plan to share.

Devoxx UK 2025: Meet the New Kid in the Sandbox - Integrating Visualization with Prometheus

I've been a regular fan of the Devoxx events over the years, speaking multiple times at both the Belgian and UK versions. I've shared on topics covering application development, developer productivity, cloud development, and architecture through the years. 

My last appearance was at Devoxx UK in 2022, so it is with great excitement that I'm sharing that I've gotten accepted for a cloud native observability session in my new domain of focus.

This year Devoxx UK 2025 conference is being held from May 7-9 in London. Being easily accessible for me so I'll be there to share some good basic insights into Perses, a CNCF Sandbox level visualization and dashboard project.

O11y Guide: Finding observability and DevEx tranquility with Platform Engineering

Monitoring system behavior is essential for ensuring long-term effectiveness. However, managing an end-to-end observability stack can feel like sailing stormy seas—without a clear plan, you risk blowing off course into system complexities. 

By integrating observability as a first-class citizen within your platform engineering practices, you can simplify this challenge and stay on track in the ever-evolving cloud-native landscape.  

Entering the world of monitoring distributed systems is a journey made up of several stages which we will cover in the rest of this article. 

2024 Year in Review - Observability Takes Center Stage

As we ease into the last few days of 2024, I like to close out this one last task and that's 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 from the last year, it's not a hard one to write. I've been sharing on this site for almost 20 years now and without ads or trying to earn anything from it. It's been truly an open and honest effort to communicate with the world. Funny thing is, when I started out I never imagined that it would take off like it has, eclipsing over 3.8 million views at the time of this writing.

With that in mind, let's dive right into the main focus, where me and my teams are focusing on the four pillars of our role; speaking, publishing, socializing, and hands-on content generation. On top of that, collateral damage is traveling the globe to do it.

Dutch Cloud Native Day 2024: Meet the New Kid in the Sandbox, Perses (slides)

As previously mentioned, today I was on-site at the Dutch Cloud Native Day in Amsterdam to speak about one of my favorite Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox projects, Perses. 

The session I gave covered its attempts at becoming an open specification for dashboards and the open dashboard tool for Prometheus and other data sources. 

We saw how to integrate your visualizations as code, how easy it is to create beautiful dashboards, and I sent the attendees home with a free, online, self-paces workshop to get you started with your first Perses dashboards.

To complete the content sharing, below you will find the slides from my session.

Dutch Cloud Native Day 2024: Meet the New Kid in the Sandbox, Perses

On Tuesday, 10 December I'll be attending and speaking at the Dutch Cloud Native Day in Amsterdam. 

This one day event will be hosted at the University of Amsterdam buildings in the Science Park at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. 

I'll be sharing an overview of the latest new kid in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox projects, Perses. The talk will cover its attempts at becoming an open specification for dashboards and the open dashboard tool for Prometheus and other data sources. 

Join me for a fun session on how to integrate your visualizations as code, how easy it is to create beautiful dashboards, and head home with a free, online, self-paces workshop to get you started with your first Perses dashboards.

Cloud Native Rejekts NA: Meet the New Kid in the Sandbox - Integrating Visualization with Prometheus (slides)

I previously posted that I'd be in Salt Lake City at the fun Cloud Native Rejekts this week.

Today I shared my session on Perses, which is focused on providing true open source visualization and dashboards to the users of Prometheus. This talk brought the background, updated the current status of what you can do and what you can't, shared the future plans, and left behind a free hands-on workshop for attendees to pursue post-event.

Projects in the observability space tend to gravitate to the CNCF, and Perses jumped into the process of becoming a CNCF Sandbox project. The process took awhile and in mid-August they kicked off voting. Amazingly it only took a few days for the Perses project to pass the number of voted needed to become the newest member in the CNCF Sandbox tier. It was high time you met this new kid on the block!

Below you'll find the abstract, slides and recording for my session for you to pursue at your leisure. 

Cloud Native Rejekts NA: Meet the New Kid in the Sandbox - Integrating Visualization with Prometheus

When your talk is not accepted for KubeCon NA, what can you do? Submit it to Cloud Native Rejekts of course! 

I did exactly that with this session that brings the newest member of the CNCF Sandbox tier of projects to you. This event takes place in Salt Lake City, Utah from 10-11 Nov 2024.

Since I started working with Prometheus, I've gotten involved with Perses, which is focused on providing true open source visualization and dashboards to the users of Prometheus.

This talk will bring the background, the current status of what you can do and what you can't, share what the future plans are, and leave behind a free hands-on workshop for attendees to pursue post-event.

KCD Porto: Choose Your Own Adventure - Cloud Native Observability Pitfalls (slides)

Today I presented at  KCD Porto in Portugal, speaking to one of my favorite subjects in observability.  .

This inaugural event was really well done and had four different stages with talks from key-note speakers, leading experts and technical experts, and interactive workshops. 

There were a lot of different opportunities for networking across the two day event in sunny Porto, where the food, snacks and drinks throughout the event were nothing short of amazing! There were over +300 attendees at the Alfandega Congress Center which is right on the Douro river, so the views from my session were stunning out over the river. 

Below you will find the slides from my session and the abstract.

Infobip Shift EU 2024: Platform Engineers Arise! Adding Observability to Your Platform Toolbox (slides)

Today I shared my workshop collection on the attending Platform Engineers, giving them all they needed to get started integrating observability from the ground up in their developer experiences. This all focused on the metrics, tracing, pipeline, and visualization projects from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

This year's Infobip Shift EU was from 15-17 September and below you will find the outline of my workshop I'm giving covering observability for Platform Engineers. 

My talk was based on an observability workshop collection covering metrics, tracing, pipelines, and visualization of telemetry data. Platform engineering can and should include observability from the basic start of their developer experience and these open source CNCF projects all provide what you need to get started.

Below you will find my slides and the original abstract from my workshop.

PromCon EU 2024: Meet the New Kid in the Sandbox - Integrating Perses Visualization with Prometheus (slides + video)

Today I shared an update on the Perses dashboard and visualization project, the newest member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox tier.

It was at PromCon EU 2024 in Berlin, Germany and I shared about how far along Perses is, including how easily you can start integrating it with the Prometheus monitoring system today.

I've been attending this event for the last two years since my career took me in the direction of cloud native observability, with CNCF projects like Prometheus being the natural direction I gravitated towards. Since working with Prometheus, I've also gotten involved with Perses, which is focused on providing true open source visualization and dashboards to the users of Prometheus.

Let's look at the talk, the slides, and video recording of my session.

Infobip Shift EU 2024: Platform Engineers Arise! Adding Observability to Your Platform Toolbox

Back in 2018 I was exposed for the first time to an amazing conference then known as Shift Developer Conference. It was an amazing location in Split, Croatia and one of the founders, Ivan Burazin quickly became a good friend.

I spoke on the main stage which was hosted in the Croatian National Opera House, something that remains a special experience. I've stayed in contact with the organizers and went to Infobip Shift EU in Zadar last September presenting on avoiding the common pitfalls around the flood of cloud data that typically comes with the user experience. In the Spring I was at Infobip Shift NA in Miami to share a workshop focused on the Perses project. 

This year's Infobip Shift EU is from 15-17 September and below you will find the outline of my workshop I'm giving covering observability for Platform Engineers. 

Let's look at the session and activities around this year's event.

KCD Porto: Choose Your Own Adventure - Cloud Native Observability Pitfalls

A new destination is on the horizon after I was invited to speak at KCD Porto in Portugal on 27-28 September. The fun part of this one is that it's the very first edition in Portugal, adding to my growing list of KCD events where I've made the first time speaker listing.

They list what you can expect as follows:

• 4 different stages with talks from key-note speakers, leading experts and technical experts, while participating in interactive workshops and events. 
• A lot of different opportunities for networking with other linked-minded folks. 
• Tasty food, snacks and drinks throughout the entire event.
• + 300 Diverse attendees & speakers including leading experts from Open Source, DevOps and Cloud Native communities.

It will be located at the Alfandega Congress Center which is right on the Douro river, so looking forward to the views from my session over the river! Let's look at what I plan to talk about.

PromCon EU: Meet the New Kid in the Sandbox - Integrating Visualization with Prometheus

I'm going to be speaking at the one and only PromCon EU 2024 on 11-12 September in Berlin, Germany. This is a single track event with a set size of 300 attendees dedicated to the Prometheus monitoring system.

As they state on the website, "PromCon aims to connect Prometheus users and developers from around the world in order to exchange knowledge, best practices, and experience gained around using Prometheus. We also want to collaborate to build a community and grow professional connections around systems and service monitoring."

I've been attending this event for the last two years since my career took me in the direction of cloud native observability, with Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects like Prometheus being the natural direction I gravitated towards. Since working with Prometheus, I've also gotten involved with a new project called Perses, which is focused on providing true open source visualization and dashboards to the users of Prometheus.

Let's look at the talk I'm going to give to introduce you to this new kid on the block, Perses.