My LFX Mentorship at OpenTelemetry Has Come to an End

My LFX Mentorship at OpenTelemetry Go Compile Instrumentation (otelc) has ended. I’ve already written about how I got here and why I applied and about the technical work, so this one’s just a short summary and reflection.

What shipped

The biggest piece of work was import-driven instrumentation selection, covered in my last post.

The other piece, registry-backed integration search through the OpenTelemetry Ecosystem Explorer, is still in progress. We’re also migrating otelc’s instrumentations into a separate contrib repo, which should make this kind of work easier to build on. I’ll write about these in a future post.

What I gained

Getting better at communication was one of the reasons I applied. I was always fine talking async over GitHub, comments, reviews, PR descriptions, but I didn’t have much confidence in live SIG meetings or calls. Weekly SIG meetings and regular syncs with my mentors fixed that.

I’m also a lot more interested in observability than when I started. I want to keep exploring the OpenTelemetry ecosystem, mainly around Rust and eBPF. I’m graduating in about a year, and this mentorship is a big part of why I’m now seriously looking at observability as a career direction.

The project got a lot of traction during my mentorship, we submitted two project proposals for the next LFX term, so alongside my own contributions I reviewed many PRs. Reading other people’s approaches and review discussions taught me things faster than writing my own code ever did.

What’s next

I’m mentoring a project myself next term, co-mentoring with Xabier Martinez. I’m also planning to stay in touch with my mentors and everyone else I’ve gotten to know through this.

Thank you

Thanks to my mentors, and to the OpenTelemetry and CNCF community, for everything over the past few months. ❤️