Software Infrastructure Engineer, System Programmer, Performance Engineer. Obsessed with observability, instrumentation, and low-level programming. Slow thinker. Open Source Enthusiast. Mentor. Blogger and speaker. Introverted human (not Cylon, I guess). Pronouns: He/Him.
Deep in the trenches of Go compile-time magic, runtime eBPF trickery, and tracing wizardry. Keeping a soft spot for profiling while tinkering with Go and its toolchain. Still exploring distributed systems, time-series (Prometheus) sorcery, and making machines sing in harmony.
Currently building Go instrumentation and tracing while keeping an eye on profiling at Datadog. Based in Berlin with my partner and our son.
If you work at a company that runs its own Go module proxy and you connect through a VPN, you’ve probably seen this:
1 2 Get "https://binaries.example.com/google.golang.org/grpc/@v/v1.77.0.mod": dial tcp 172.27.5.36:443: i/o timeout The module has nothing to do with your company. It’s a public dependency. Yet Go refuses to fetch it from the public proxy and just dies with a timeout. The frustrating part: you know proxy.golang.org has the module, and your config lists it as a fallback. So why doesn’t it fall through?
...
Stop Putting API Keys in Your Shell Config
We all know better. Don’t hardcode secrets. Use a vault. Rotate your keys. We’ve been saying this for years.
And then the agentic coding boom happened.
Suddenly every tool wants an API key. OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq, Mistral, Replicate—the list grows weekly. And where do those keys end up? Right there in .zshrc, in plain text, because you needed it working right now and you were going to fix it later.
...
talk: Unleashing the Go Toolchain
The -toolexec flag hides a super-power in the Go toolchain: it lets you turn every go build into a programmable pipeline. In this session we’ll reveal how a simple wrapper command can inject custom analysis, code generation, and instrumentation—without changing a line of application code.
You’ll see how platform and tooling teams use -toolexec to weave organisation-wide practices directly into the build, from enforcing error-handling standards to automatically adding observability hooks. We’ll map the journey from a “hello-world” wrapper to full Aspect-Oriented compile-time transformations, and discuss the trade-offs that come with this new power.
...
Vibe Coding with Cursor: My R&D Week Adventure 🚀
TL;DR: Spent a week building cool stuff with Cursor, an AI-powered IDE. Found it surprisingly effective for both coding and managing my second brain. When your requirements are clear, it’s almost magical! ✨ 1 1 “Magic” here = fast iteration because the AI had unambiguous intent + cohesive context windows. ↩ The Setup: R&D Week Vibes You know that feeling when R&D week rolls around, and you’re caught between “I should learn something useful” and “I want to have fun”? Well, this time I decided to combine both by diving deep into Cursor, an AI-powered code editor that’s been making waves in the developer community.
...
FOSDEM 2025: Blimey, What a Weekend!
Another Year, Another FOSDEM FOSDEM—the annual pilgrimage to Brussels for a weekend of open-source brilliance, hallway track magic, and the inevitable sleep deprivation. This year’s Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting was, as always, a whirlwind of ideas, people, and tech so bleeding-edge it practically needed bandages.
But for me? It was all about seeing friends. Catching up, syncing, and squeezing in as many conversations as humanly possible. As we always say—the hallway track is the real conference. I’m beyond grateful for the people I managed to see, and equally bummed about those I missed. But with a toddler waiting at home, even carving out this limited time was a logistical miracle.
...
