Mike Goldsmith, Staff Software Engineer at Honeycomb, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to talk about Open Telemetry, company culture, and the pros and cons of Go vs. .NET. Corey and Mike discuss why OTel is such an important tool, while pointing out its double-edged sword of being fully open-source and community-driven. Opening up about Honeycomb’s company culture and how to find a work-life balance as a fully-remote employee, Mike points out how core-values and social interaction breathe life into a company like Honeycomb.About MikeMike is an OpenSource focused software engineer that builds tools to help users create, shape and deliver system & application telemetry. Mike contributes to a number of OpenTelemetry initiatives including being a maintainer for Go Auto instrumentation agent, Go proto packages and an emeritus .NET SDK maintainer..Links Referenced:
Honeycomb: https://www.honeycomb.io/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Mike_Goldsmith

Honeycomb blog: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikegoldsmith/

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at Honeycomb who I just love talking to. And we’ve gotten to talk to these folks a bunch of different times in a bunch of different ways. They’ve been a recurring sponsor of this show and my other media nonsense, they’ve been a reference customer for our consulting work at The Duckbill Group a couple of times now, and we just love working with them just because every time we do we learn something from it. I imagine today is going to be no exception. My guest is Mike Goldsmith, who’s a staff software engineer over at Honeycomb. Mike, welcome to the show.Mike: Hello. Thank you for having me on the show today.Corey: So, I have been familiar with Honeycomb for a long time. And I’m still trying to break myself out of the misapprehension that, oh, they’re a small, scrappy, 12-person company. You are very much not that anymore. So, we’ve gotten to a point now where I definitely have to ask the question: what part of the observability universe that Honeycomb encompasses do you focus on?Mike: For myself, I’m very focused on the telemetry side, so the place where I work on the tools that customers deploy in their own infrastructure to collect all of that useful data and make—that we can then send on to Honeycomb to make use of and help identify where the problems are, where things are changing, how we can best serve that data.Corey: You’ve been, I guess on some level, there’s—I’m trying to make this not sound like an accusation, but I don’t know if we can necessarily avoid that—you have been heavily involved in OpenTelemetry for a while, both professionally, as well as an open-source contributor in your free time because apparently you also don’t know how to walk away from work when the workday is done. So, let’s talk about that a little bit because I have a number of questions. Starting at the very beginning, for those who have not gone trekking through that particular part of the wilderness-slash-swamp, what is OpenTelemetry?Mike: So, OpenTelemetry is a vendor-agnostic set of tools that allow anybody to collect data about their system and then send it to a target back-end to make use of that data. The data, the visualization tools, and the tools that make use of that data are a variety of different things, so whether it’s tracing data or metrics or logs, and then it’s trying to take value from that. The big thing what OpenTelemetry is aimed at doing is making the collection of the data and the tra