About me

Hi! 👋

My name is Bartek (full name is Bartłomiej). I originate from Poland, precisely from the city called Gdańsk , but nowadays, I live and work in London, UK.

I am a curious and (bit too) ambitious human who happened to dive very deeply into software engineering waters. My first dev job started in 2012, and since then, I have enjoyed delivering challenging projects, together with many awesome people I met on the way.

My main focus was always building and running software in web/backend/distributed systems/infrastructure areas. Even though I have ongoing experience as a global-scale SRE, I love development the most: I love building pragmatic, innovative, scalable, high-quality solutions.

I worked at Improbable , a fantastic gaming UK startup with a global Kubernetes infrastructure using and developing impressive and unique systems. In late 2017, we created Thanos project with Fabian Reinartz, which gained popularity as a default choice for scaling Prometheus. That started my shift to work entirely on open source around the Prometheus ecosystem, becoming a Prometheus maintainer and working as Principal Engineer at Red Hat . 🚀

3 years later I joined Google as Senior SWE Tech Lead for Google Cloud Managed Prometheus team to get Prometheus experience into enterprise, global, managed scalability for those who does not want to run the OSS stack. It also gives me opportunity and focus to really improve the key ingredient of robust cloud native metrics in OSS - Prometheus and its standards! Finally, I was always fun of Google products and developer experience. Go, Kubernetes, Android, Chrome, pprof, SRE, even Prometheus – those OSS projects would not exists if not Google! I am super grateful for the opportunity to check what’s the secret sauce for this level of innovation and software quality.

In 2022 I published my Efficient Go book which was invented out of the need to teach others the pragmatic efficiency skills I learned in my career. I hope this will trigger even better quality (and cheaper to run) Go projects in the future! (:

I love innovating, mentoring, teaching, speaking at conferences and working with communities, especially around Observability. That’s why at some point, we created the CNCF Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for Observability , where I am performing a technical leadership role.

I also try to mentor others a few times a year and motivate others to mentor in the CNCF programs. So if you would like to be a mentor and help to grow the next generation of open source engineers, let me know! I am incredibly grateful to those who helped me to be where I am. Thus IMO, we all need to give back sometimes.

The rest of my time is reserved for my beloved wife & daughter, gym, ~volleyball~ (ACL+MCL injury) and sometimes not-eco-friendly cars or motorcycles (:

Feedback

I am always looking forward to hearing feedback! (:

Especially if you feel angry with what I say or do, I would love to hear that. This way, we all learn! Reach me through any channels listed on main page .

CV

Let’s just reuse stuff, shall we? (: My is CV is available on Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/bwplotka/

Open Source

I love innovation in SWE space. This is why you see me creating, but also maintaining various projects. Some of them I created or co-created, some of them I joined afterwards. Not exhausting lists are provided below.

More popular ones: Thanos , Prometheus , core , Demo Navigator , prometheus/client_golang , e2e , go-grpc-middleware , bingo , mdox , mimic , jiralert

Other: my , oidc , go-jwt , go-tokenauth , kEdge , grpc-proxy , go-k8sresolver , promeval

Public Talks

Some talks I performed (or co-performed 🤗)