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. I like to build interesting things: products, open-source tools, and writing about the work. I work on platform infrastructure, distributed systems, and the tooling that makes engineering teams faster. Currently based in Melbourne.
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.
- Building a second brain in Obsidian — local vault and an enterprise layer for the team.
- 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.→
Find me on GitHub, LinkedIn, or X — or send me a message via the contact form. I read everything and reply to most of it.
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