Hey there! It’s been a while since my last post! A busy schedule combined with a summer vacation in Greece made it tough to keep this blog updated! The new (academic) year though starts with new and exciting stuff and experiences awaiting!

Last week I was in Athens for a really fast trip, to attend and give a talk during the Grafana & Friends Meetup! It was the first Grafana & Friends meetup in Greece and I’m thrilled to have been a part of it!

Before we talk about the Meetup, let’s take a quick look back, earlier this year at GrafanaCON in Amsterdam. This is where I met Dionysis Tsoumas and Ioannis Papadakis, two of our Grafana Champions. After a joyful event, some brainstorming and a few beers in the capital of The Netherlands, we decided that we should try and organize the first-ever Grafana & Friends Meetup in Greece. I didn’t even know if these folks were going to reach out to me again until they showed up shortly after GrafanaCON, trying to set a date for the Meetup. And they made it happen on September 11th!

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The event was hosted at GWI’s offices in the heart of Athens. The Meetup was full, the energy was really high and I had the pleasure to talk about CI/CD Observability after Paschalis Tsilias’ talk on Vendor-neutral telemetry collection using Grafana Alloy and OpenTelemetry. I was delighted to see once again that people are really happy about the work we do and that we were able to address a huge pain point for modern companies that do CI/CD. I got to answer many questions and learn valuable stuff from other people around the ways they and their companies deal with this issue. I was also eager to invite some people to the Working Group around CI/CD o11y and its Semantic Conventions - a handful of them joined! In general, I am always astonished to see that what we are building is actually something that people are craving for, and I am excited for what lies ahead.

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Of course, this current blogpost and the whole experience wouldn’t exist without the excellent organization and warm hospitality of Dionysis and Ioannis. Thanks for being awesome, for inviting us and for all the good times we’ve had so far! To many more!

Next stops: KCD Porto and SRECon EU in Dublin, where I’ll be attending both as a speaker! Stay tuned, stay healthy and see you soon!