What a month! What a month!
My April was packed and I’d like to share some highlights with you all!
KubeCon EU#
I started the month attending #KubeConEU 🇬🇧 and spending some time on the Observatory with contributors and maintainers of the OpenTelemetry project. Connecting, sharing, discussing and learning is always great. Another point that I’m always excited about is checking the Observatory wall with top contributors’ handles. It is a nice tap on the shoulders to see your handle over there.
I love the feeling that I leave when attending KubeCon, it is like there is a whole world of new things that you need to learn. At first, it can feel overwhelming, and I experienced this myself initially. However, with time, you accept this reality and begin to see KubeCon as a compass. You use it to see the direction you are going, and also to validate if you are not going off track 😅.
I got back for a week and packed already to go to Brazil! Datadog was running an event in São Paulo and I was the host, but I’ll talk about that in a sec, because as I’ve said, the month was packed!
Cloud Native Araraquara#
Just before traveling to Brazil, I saw that a new Community Group was created in my hometown (Araraquara 🍊). I’ve reached out to Matheus Ulisses, one of the organizers of Cloud Native Araraquara and said that I would be in the city visiting my family in April and I’d love to have the chance to talk about OpenTelemetry with the local community. He agreed right away and started discussing with the other organizers to put together the event. I can’t thank them enough for it. The event was a blast! We got 97 attendees on a Saturday morning, between 2 public holidays!!!! Yes, you read it right! Thanks to the whole Cloud Native Araraquara team for the great event and spotless organization!
Just a side note on my Araraquara visit. It is great to see the family in Araraquara, but 2 things that I miss a lot from there are my barber and my tattoo artist, so I couldn’t leave without paying them a visit!
Datadog Summit São Paulo#
After that I got back to working with Serasa, Mercado Libre and Itaú in their talks for the Datadog Summit São Paulo. We were close to the event and I wanted to have some dry-runs so they could practice a bit and be more comfortable during their presentations. Of course we also had some adjusts on presentation time and story flow, but that’s all part of the dry-run bundle 😊
The big day finally arrived, we met at the Unique hotel in São Paulo, which is astonishing and really remarkable. I’m Brazilian, but I visited São Paulo 2 or 3 times during my 27 years in Brazil. I’ve never heard of Unique before, but I think now it will be hard to forget!
10 minutes before the event and my heart started rushing, yep, that was the time the stage frightening kicked in, I was pretty chill till that specific moment, we had everything done, the talks were good and rehearsed, the speakers were there, the audience was there, it was just about going on stage and performing what we prepared, but my brain had other feelings, what can I say!?
1 minute to go, let’s do it! I think I haven’t felt that way since I was playing my last basketball finals (20 years ago?), and then…
With you Juliano Costa!
… It was time to get on stage.
Thankfully I calmed down and managed to MC the event smoothly. The duration of the talks and the interactions were precise and we wrapped it up just 3 minutes after the planned, but that’s because we had to sing “Happy Birthday” to Igor, so we are all excused.
I want to thank all the speakers we had on stage during the keynotes: Daniela, Igor, Gabriel, Juliano, Alexandre and Álvaro. Thanks for sharing your stories and making part of the event! I also want to thank Claire and Jason, without you both I wouldn’t make it! I really appreciate the support!
To wrap it up, during the afternoon I had the chance to connect with Francislei and show him some nice stuff Datadog is doing with OpenTelemetry data, and it was a great opportunity to hear their challenges and concerns. Not everyone has Mercado Libre’s scale, so these challenges are definitely on another level! I hope we can hear more from them in the future!
Now back home, the focus is on DASH where I’ll be presenting the OTel workshop during the Partner Summit and main event. I’m also working with a couple of customers to bring their stories into a talk.
Hope to see some of you there in New York.