Meet the Grafana Labs team: Cortex maintainer Peter Štibraný!

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 Peter!

Name: Peter Štibraný

Grafana Labs Software Engineer Peter Štibraný

Current location/time zone

I am a Slovak expat living in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen in Denmark. My time zone is CET (GMT+1).

What do you do at Grafana Labs?

I am a member of the team that works on Cortex, Loki, and Prometheus. These days I mostly work on improving the blocks storage in Cortex, which should help Cortex to run more easily and be more cost effective. Thanks to my recent Cortex work, I was just voted into Cortex maintainer role, which sounds exciting (right?), but I am still figuring out what it actually means.

What open source projects do you contribute to?

I primarily contribute to Cortex and a little bit to Loki. Before joining Grafana Labs, my contributions to open source projects was very sporadic.

What are your GitHub and Twitter handles?

github.com/pstibrany, and twitter.com/pstbrn.

What do you like to do in your free time?

Practice 40 hours a day … or more like 20 minutes, if I’m lucky. I enjoy playing my chromatic and diatonic harmonicas. I am currently working through Max de Aloe’s book on chromatic harmonica, and also practicing for my “Advanced Beginner” final test at Tomlin Harmonica school. When it’s too late to bother my neighbors, I learn bits of music theory, listen to Sticky Notes podcast, or catch up with the latest news on search for planet nine.

What’s your favorite new gadget or tech toy?

Lately we have been building various robots from the Lego Boost set with my daughter, which is great fun! Other than that, I’m not really into tech toys or gadgets. Does digital metronome count? (Well, it sure does… 1… 2… 3… 4…)

What do you do to get “in the zone” when you code?

Being at home alone with no distractions is a great way to work. I don’t need to do anything special to get into the zone… Once I start working on a well-defined problem, I can focus on it until it’s solved (or I give up 😆).

What’s the best part of your job?

The best part is working on projects that people love to use. It seems to me that everybody who joins Grafana Labs has used Grafana with some monitoring tool before, and loved the experience. That was my case as well, and it’s a great privilege to be able to work on these projects as a full-time job now.

And of course, all the amazing people we have – being able to hire from around the world is so great! (Well, it’s less great that we don’t get to see each other face-to-face very often, but such is the life of remote workers.)

What’s your favorite food?

Hmm, salmon sandwich? My daughter hates salmon with a passion, so it’s a constant battle between us. :)

What’s the last thing you binge-watched?

I’ve recently rewatched Detectorists, lovely TV comedy series from the U.K. As the series author said, “Millions of people have hobbies that to anyone not into it appear dull, but it’s what makes them tick.” In this case, the hobby is metal detecting. And in the last season also “Bat Action Trust – 24 hour Bat Helpline.” I can easily identify with several of the characters in the series. 😀

• “They are so weird, why do you hang out with them?”
• “They’re not weird.”
• “Yeah, they are, they are freaks.”
• “I like them, they are my friends.”

What superpowers do you wish you had (or do you have!)?

I wish I could slow down the time. Everything I do seems to take much longer than I expect it to take, so if I could slow down the time, it would even out. Right? Oh wait…

What’s the last thing you’ve gotten off your bucket list?

I guess joining an online harmonica school a year ago. Next on my list is to start playing music with some other people… not sure where I will find time for that, but in my head it sounds exciting. 😀 And then to play with the symphonic orchestra once, but I need to practice a lot before that can really happen.