Collaboration and an Emphasis on Project Over Product with Open Telemetry

Today’s episode is a round table with Morgan McClean, Ben Sigelman, and Alolita Sharma, the maintainers of Open Telemetry. Open Telemetry is a high-quality, ubiquitous, and portable telemetry to enable effective observability with a mission to make telemetry as approachable and applicable as possible. Open Telemetry’s values center on compatibility, reliability, resilience, and performance. With these objectives in hand, our maintainers are making waves in open space.

In this episode Morgan, Ben, and Alolita breakdown their individaul involvement in Open Telemetry. They discuss the paths each of them took to end up there, and the varied skillsets the bring to the project. Open Telemetry’s vision and mission is unique in its clarity and precision, and they share some insight as to why. Open Telemetry’s collaboration allows the space for their mission statement to shine through, and as a project before a product, give to the open source community. Check out the conversation for Morgan, Ben and Alolita’s excellent perspectives!

Highlights:

  • Introductions to our three maintainers and their invovlement in Open Telemetry (00:26)

  • Why and how Open Telemetry has such an explicitly clear mission and vision (03:44)

  • Making it clear what Open Telemetry is not (08:20)

  • Thinking as a project, not product (10:45)

  • The pros and cons of working with “frenemies” (17:55)

  • Why Open Telemetry has been successful (27:22)

  • Closing comments on Open Telemetry (32:35)

Links:

Open Telemetry

Chris Hill