Meet the Grafana Labs team: Cortex and Loki contributor Owen Diehl!
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 Owen!
Name: Owen Diehl
Grafana Labs Software Engineer Owen Diehl
Current location/time zone
I live in Washington, D.C. (UTC-5).
What do you do at Grafana Labs?
I work on the Cortex and Loki team at Grafana. For those unaware, these are open source projects created to help monitor applications via metrics and logs. In particular, I’ve worked on finding ways to query large datasets. This includes the usual suspects like caching as well as more exotic methods like rewriting queries to be more parallelizable (i.e. average can be expressed as sum/count).
What open source projects do you contribute to?
I mostly contribute to the Loki project where I’m a maintainer. Recently I’ve:
Worked on the new query frontend component
Extended the LogQL query language
Worked on “query sharding,” a way to rewrite incoming queries in order to make them more parallelizable. This work started off in Cortex, but has expanded to support Loki as well.
What are your GitHub and Twitter handles? owen-d on GitHub and castle_vanity on Twitter.
What do you like to do in your free time?
I enjoy: hiking, playing video games, running, small gatherings (conversation/food/drink). I’m hoping to start a garden this year!
What do you do to get “in the zone” when you code?
I walk around my house talking to myself about what I want to build.
What’s the best part of your job?
The absolute best part of working at Grafana Labs is self-direction. I’m empowered to be creative not just in solving problems, but more importantly determining which problems to solve. The people are all right, too. ;)
What’s your favorite food?
Crawfish (look it up!). Specifically the New Orleans variety although I really want to try the Vietnamese style from Houston.
What’s the last thing you binge-watched?
Giri-Haji on Netflix.
