Meet the Grafana Labs Team: Malcolm Holmes!

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 Malcolm!

Name: Malcolm Holmes

Grafana Labs Software Engineer Malcolm Holmes

Current location/time zone I live in Stroud, U.K. (GMT).

What do you do at Grafana Labs? I am a member of the Infrastructure team. I help maintain and develop the infrastructure that other teams use to deliver services. At Grafana Labs, development teams manage their own software. We’re all SREs here. Our team provides the Kubernetes infrastructure that they use. So much of our work involves improving workflows for the development teams. This has involved a lot of work with Jsonnet and our new open source tool, Tanka, which we use heavily for deploying to our Kubernetes clusters, for example.

What open source projects do you contribute to? I’m a member of the Apache Software Foundation. Many years ago I helped with their infrastructure, maintaining a Wiki and their mailing lists. I am an inactive committer on the Apache Lucene/Solr project. Recently, I’ve been contributing to Tanka, and have been enjoying its increasing popularity.

What are your GitHub and Twitter handles? GitHub is @malcolmholmes. I don’t use Twitter.

What do you like to do in your free time? Too much! Working on a webapp for my dad. I’m about to start teaching a meditation course locally (I’ve been a Buddhist for a long time – it is about time).

What’s your favorite new gadget or tech toy? My 3D printer (a Prusa i3mk2s with MMU1, so not so new). I’ve been making Grafana knick-knacks recently: I’ve made brackets to fix cables, USB hubs, SD card readers onto my desk. Lots of fun. I tend to design using OpenSCAD, which really suits me as a software developer.

What’s your claim to fame/greatest achievement? I have developed an approach to meditation for parents that seems to really work, but doesn’t seem to be a part of the meditation/mindfulness world yet. It is described here.

Do you have any hidden talents? Probably, but they are so hidden I don’t know what they are. Oh, I can do the splits with my fingers.

What’s the last thing you binge-watched? I recently re-watched the whole Mentalist series. I really enjoyed the playfulness that Patrick presents – the calm and apparent disinterest.

What superpowers do you wish you had (or do you have!)? The ability to remember the things I’ve forgotten when I get to the supermarket till. If I could work out how to do that, and then share it, I could be rich!

What’s the last thing you’ve gotten off your bucket list? Started learning Kung Fu. I’m only a few months in, but have been really enjoying it.