OpenTelemetry and Continuous Feedback by Roni Dover

What do you know about the code changes that were just introduced into the codebase? When will you start noticing if something goes wrong? If there are so many accessible observability sources that can tell us what the code is doing, why are we using so little of that in our day-to-day coding? Continuous Feedback is a new dev practice that aims to make practical usage of code runtime data to shorten the feedback loop during development. It enables developers to get early data about their code changes and detect issues and regressions as-they-code. At the same time, collecting data from multiple environments, allows developers to instantly understand how their code is performing in the real world. In this session, we'll look past the novelty of using OSS observability tools and technologies, to discuss how we can actually make them useful for developers. We'll take a look at the benefits of enabling OpenTelemetry collection for dev and test data and examine OSS tools to help analyze the application runtime. We'll go over code examples of common anti-patterns, code smells, hidden errors, and other types of problems that observability can reveal prior to merging a PR. Ultimately, the goal should not be simply observing the application or creating nice-looking dashboards. Rather, success is in leveraging observability data in order to achieve a more effective dev process and write better code. RONI DOVER Holistic developer and builder with a passion for development processes and practices. Afflicted by an acute Product Manager/Developer split personality disorder that was never treated. Currently, CTO and co-founder of Digma (digma.ai), an IDE plugin for code runtime AI analysis to help accelerate development in complex codebases. A big believer in evidence-based development, and a proponent of Continuous Feedback in all aspects of Software Engineering.