How we cut p99 latency by 80% with one trace[Engineering]
A single OpenTelemetry trace showed us where to look. The fix was a five-line config change.→
Kristof Kowalski
I'm a Staff Engineer who builds products, open-source tools, and writes about the work. I work on platform infrastructure, distributed systems, and the tooling that makes engineering teams faster. Currently based in Sydney.
You'll find longer pieces in the blog, smaller things in notes, and the projects I've been building on projects. The /now page has a more current snapshot of what I'm working on.
- Rewriting a sidecar tracer in Go (otel-sidecar v2).
- Reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications for the third time, slowly.
- Slowly migrating notes off Obsidian into plain Markdown + Git.
- Helping a friend ship their first Go service to production.
- Trying to learn one new thing a week and write about it.
Notes on maintainer burnout[Open Source]
Three years running a popular Go library taught me that the work isn't the code — it's the inbox.→
Incident retrospective: the cache stampede of April 14[Retrospectives]
What happened, what we did about it, and the one thing I'd do differently next time.→
The fastest way to reach me is by email or on GitHub. I read everything, and I reply to most of it.
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