Meet the Grafana Labs Team: Marcus Olsson

As Grafana Labs continues to grow, we’d like you to get to know the team members who are working on the cool stuff you’re using. Check out the latest of our Friday team profiles.

Meet Marcus!

Name: Marcus Olsson

Grafana Labs Developer Advocate Marcus Olsson

Current location/time zone: I’m based in Stockholm, Sweden (CET).

What do you do at Grafana Labs? As a Developer Advocate for the Grafana team, I help users and contributors to use and develop for Grafana. Usually, that means doing talks and workshops, but also writing blog posts, tutorials, and code samples, to help people get things done. It’s an incredibly varied and rewarding role, where I get to learn new things every day.

What open source projects do you contribute to? My most significant open source contribution is probably tui-go, a UI library written in Go, for building terminal applications. Although I thoroughly enjoyed writing it, eventually I had to drop it as I had to spend more time maintaining it than I was willing to.

What are your GitHub and Twitter handles? Despite having a painfully common Swedish name, I managed to snag “marcusolsson” on both GitHub and Twitter.

What do you like to do in your free time? As a lifelong learner, I tend to dive into different hobbies throughout the year. Right now, my focus is to improve my cooking skills, and learn more about zero-waste. That being said, playing cooperative board games, and story-heavy adventure games are things I enjoy pretty much all year round.

What’s your favorite new gadget or tech toy? I’ve used the Headspace app for two months now, and it has been the best way I’ve used my money and time on lately. In a world that’s always on, learning how to turn off is a skill worth investing in. The favorite non-technical things are my two undead teddybears, my Pakt One bag, and my wooden cooking spoon.

Do you like to code in silence, with music or ambient noise on your headphones, or with people talking around you? I can’t thank my partner enough for introducing me to Chillstep. I’m terrible at genres, but I think you could call it an ambient form of dubstep.

What’s the last thing you binge-watched? Does it count if you’ve already binged Rick & Morty to the point where you recite whole episodes? No? Then probably the second season of Final Space.

What superhero powers do you wish you had (or do you have!)? I wish I had the power to absorb the contents of a book by simply touching its cover. I imagine myself walking through public libraries, running my fingers across the books as I pass them. Although I’ll be the first one to admit that sounds more like a power fitting of a super villain.