Announcing Zig OpenTelemetry SDK

The first alpha release is out!

 Posted on 2025-10-28  |  5 minutes  |  904 words  |  inge4pres

Last Sunday I shared on social media my excitement for the first alpha release of the Zig OpenTelemetry SDK! This is the culmination of an investment of my personal time over the past 15 months, and I am so happy that it is finally usable. Why OpenTelemetry for Zig? If you’ve read my previous post about why Zig is great for observability, you already know my point of view on Zig’s suitability for building observability tools. [Read More]
software-engineering  observability  zig  opentelemetry  open-source 

Zig is great for Observability

Why Zig is the most suited language for Observability

 Posted on 2025-10-11  |  12 minutes  |  2502 words  |  inge4pres

After years of building observability tools and working with various languages, I believe I am i the position to express a strong opinion: Zig is the most suited language for building Observability systems. This is a bold claim, especially in a field dominated mostly by Go (hello OpenTelemetry) and more recently Rust. But after exploring Zig’s design philosophy and capabilities, I have developed a sense of confidence that Zig is the right language and ecosystem for me to build observability tools. [Read More]
software-engineering  observability  zig  performance 

Composition via embedding in Go

Unlock simpler design via a lesser known feature

 Posted on 2024-03-03  |  7 minutes  |  1354 words  |  inge4pres

I was introduced to type embedding (or embedding, in short) by Filippo Valsorda in one of his talks. Apparently this is a lesser known (and lesser used) feature of the Go language, although it’s been around since the beginning. I hope I can spread with this post how it works and how it can be pragmatically helpful to create more expressive and reusable code. What is embedding? Embedding is a powerful feature of the Go language that allows to compose types together, “bundling” new types that inherit the properties or behavior of the embedded types. [Read More]
software-engineering  golang  design-patterns 

Sustainable Performance

Craft software while looking after our planet

 Posted on 2023-07-02  |  16 minutes  |  3263 words  |  inge4pres

I mentioned sustainable performance in a previous post, telling that it “could be a blog post on its own”, and after noting interest on the matter from people I highly respect, I decided to write this post. What is sustainable performance? If you worked as a software engineer for some time, you must have faced at least once the question: “is my code running at its full potential?”. So many intricacies can arise from such a simple question, especially in a highly dynamic industry such as Information Technology. [Read More]
software-engineering  observability  cloud  green-software 

Improving 4pr.es Links

Revamping a toy project and making it a product

 Posted on 2023-04-15  |  7 minutes  |  1326 words  |  inge4pres

In the past few days I have been doing maintenance on a pet project of mine: a URL shortener. I initially built “4pres” in 2013 as a way of experimenting with the Go programming language. It is a URL shortener, it does one simple thing: it generates a random short URL (prefixed with the domain 4pr.es) for a longer one. Despite its “dumbness”, it served the greater purpose of exposing me to some software engineering problems I had never faced before. [Read More]
product  software-engineering  serverless 

Micro-committing with Git

 Posted on 2021-04-03  |  9 minutes  |  1829 words  |  inge4pres

I have been using micro-committing for some time now, during which I have adapted the usage of this technique to my needs, bringing it to a level that makes me more productive than ever in software development. Combining micro-committing with Git, while doing TDD is now my favorite development experience: I like how this workflow helps to deliver changes with speed and confidence. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach, I’m sharing what works great for me; I hope some parts of what follows will help you and your team as well. [Read More]
software-engineering  practices